“Necessarily,” said Northcote, “since the self-consciousness of matter is the ugliest phenomenon known to natural law. But to follow the line of your reasoning, the abnormal person, whatever the sphere of his activity, is invariably the enemy of his kind?”
“That is my suggestion; the suggestion of an average mind that is content to rest on the plane of matter-of-fact common sense.”
“You would say that it would have been better for mankind had the poet Shakespeare never been given to it?”
“Unquestionably. In my view, all poetry, even in what we are pleased to call a sublime and concentrated form, is a direct emanation of morbid sensibility. It stimulates those already sufficiently irritable faculties of the mind which call for a never-ceasing vigilance to hold in check. Poetry is the chief enemy against which rational common sense has to contend.”
“Then in your view the greatest enemy of the human race of which history has taken cognizance is Jesus Christ?”
“I will not say the greatest; but He shares the opprobrium that attaches to His class. It was that type of abnormalism which developed the religious sense in man; and any sense more calculated to provoke infinite misery, any sense more completely out of harmony with the facts of existence, one cannot conceive.”
“In a word, excess of any kind is repugnant to the average person?”
“One would say so; mainly, I think, because it extorts such heavy toll of all who are brought in contact with it.”
“Then elevation of feeling, profundity of thought, subtlety of insight, austerity of morals, heroism, beauty, in short, the superlative in any guise whatever, should be eliminated from the republic of the average sensual person?”
“If the average sensual person could contrive a republic for himself, that would be its first decree.”