Bearing in mind the condition of the arts at the present day, and taking into account a fact which we all very well know; namely, that thousands upon thousands are now practising these arts who have absolutely no business to be associated with them in any way, we are almost inclined to forgive Protestantism and Puritanism their smashing of our images, and their material iconoclasm; so light does this damage appear, compared with the other indirect damage they have done to the spirit of Art, by establishing the fatal precedent of allowing everybody to touch and speak of everything—however sacred.
We may argue with Buckle that the English spirit is of a kind which is essentially Protestant in temper; but this only seems to make the matter worse.
When Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold point, the one to the evils of Liberalism, and the other to the evils of anarchy, we know to what they are referring. They are referring to the impossibility, nowadays, of awakening reverence for anything or for anybody.
"May not every man in England say what he likes?" Matthew Arnold exclaims. "But," he continues, "the aspirations of culture, which is the study of perfection, are not satisfied, unless what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth saying.... Culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person may like, the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that."[32]
But what is fatal to culture is no less fatal to art, and thus we find Nietzsche saying—
"Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it becometh mob."[33]
If in the Europe, and especially in the England of to-day, everybody has a right to every judgment and to every joy; if a certain slavish truthfulness to nature and reality, rawness and ruggedness, have well-nigh wrecked higher aspirations, and if everybody can press his paltry modicum of voice, of thought, of draughtsmanship, of passion and impudence to the fore, and thus spread his portion of mediocrity like dodder over the sacred field of Art; it is because the fundamental principles of the Christian faith are no longer latent or suppressed in our midst; but active and potent—if not almighty.
It might almost be said that they have reared a special instinct—the instinct of liberty and of taking liberties, without any particular aim or purpose; and, by so doing, have thrown all virtue, all merit, all ambition, not on the side of culture, but on the side of that "free personality"[34] and rude naturalness, or truth to man's original savagery, which it seems the triumph of every one, great or small, to produce.
No one any longer claims the kind of freedom that Pope Paul III claimed for his protégé Benvenuto Cellini:[35] this would be too dangerous, because, in a trice, it would be applied to all. Therefore the insignificant majority get more freedom than is good for them, and the noble minority are deprived of their birthright.
"Thus do I speak unto you in parable," cries Zarathustra, "ye who make the soul giddy, ye preachers of equality! Tarantulas are ye unto me, and secretly revengeful ones!