“Say, old chap——”
“I am saying it. It’s the same old crisis—Rome or the Barbarians; Europe or Attila; the Prussians or Civilization.
“I tell you these half-crazed brains are beating at the gates of the world’s sanity to overthrow Reason from her very seat!
“Any alienist can tell you what the cult of ugliness means—what the morbid desire to mutilate means. What does it matter whether the living human body be the victim, or the attack be made upon figments of the imagination—whether upon the established order of harmony in music, or upon the pure standard of Greek sculpture, or upon the immortal beauty and symmetry in the pictures of the Great Masters!
“The point is this: the desire to mutilate is there; the murderous mania has discovered a safe outlet with pen, brush, chisel for weapons instead of pistol and butcher knife.
“The modernist is no longer a Ripper, except by intention. His degenerate fury wreaks itself on Art.
“Go to a Modernist Exhibition. Once the walls of an asylum would have been decorated with these drawings. Read modernist literature. Scrawled in prison bath-rooms would have been these lines in saner days. Listen to the music of your modernist. Only Bedlam could have produced and enjoyed it, once.
“But to-day all crack-brains are being drawn together under the Bolshevistic impulse to swarm, mutilate what is beautiful, destroy what lies within the eternal laws, annihilate all order, all that has withstood the test of civilisation.
“The Great American Ass hears the pandemonium and looks over the walls at the crazed herd of his demented fellows milling around the citadel.
“He looks at them and wags his ears, interested, perplexed. They’ll tear him to pieces if they get in——”