162 CARICATURE, 



a tacit consensus of opinion, we refuse to talk about, and 

 these therefore we are unwilling to see reflected in art's 

 spiritual looking-glass. We grudge their being brought into 

 the sphere of intellectual things. We feel that the representa- 

 tion of them, implying as this does the working of the artist's 

 mind and our mind on them, contradicts a self-preservative 

 instinct which has been elaborately cultivated through un- 

 numbered generations for the welfare of the social organism. 

 Such representation brings before the sense in figure what is 

 already powerful enough in fact. It stirs in us what educa- 

 tion tends to curb, and exposes what humane culture teaches 

 us to withdraw from observation. 



This position admits of somewhat different statement. At 

 a certain point art must make common cause with morality, 

 and the plastically beautiful has to be limited by ethical laws. 

 Man is so complex a being, and in the complex of his nature 

 the morally-trained sensibilities play so prominent a part, that 

 art, which aims at giving only elevated enjoyment, cannot 

 neglect ethics. Without being didactic it must be moralised, 

 because the normal man is moralised. If it repudiates this 

 obligation, it errs against its own ideal of harmony, rhythm, 

 repose, synthetic beauty. It introduces an element which we 

 seek to subordinate in life, and by which we are afraid of 

 being mastered. It ceases to be adequate to humanity in its 

 best moments, and these best moments art has undertaken to 

 present in forms of sensuous but dignified loveliness. 



Most people will agree upon this point. There remains, 

 however, considerable difference of opinion as to the bound- 

 aries which art dares not overpass as to what deserves the 

 opprobrious title of indecency in plastic or poetic presenta- 

 tion. Some folk seem inclined to ban the nude without 

 exception, relegating the grandest handiwork of God, the 

 human form divine, to the obscurity of shrouded vestments. 

 Disinclined as I am to adopt this extreme position, I admit 

 that just here the cleanness or uncleanness of the artist's mind, 

 as felt in his touch on doubtful subjects, becomes a matter 

 of ethical importance. All depends on taste, on method of 

 treatment, on the tone communicated, on the mood in which 



