Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/75

 a right to have their delight in the salacious gratified by a piece of expert pornography, then my poor coal-heaver has a right to have his delight in the salacious gratified by a piece of inexpert pornography.

But the warier critics avoid this ticklish position. They prefer a quicksand of a more plausible surface. Those who argue for the 'freedom of art' on high aesthetic grounds contend that the moral influence of works of art is vastly exaggerated. The influence of works of art, they declare, is artistic. Æsthetic experience, they assert, is unique in kind.

When one discusses the matter in this fashion, one is soon lost in a metaphysical mist; so let us return to our coal-heaver. What they contend is, that the effect of the coal-heaver's inartistic filthy story may be degrading, because it operates in the moral consciousness and may have practical consequences; but that the effect of the author's artistic filthy story may be disregarded, because it operates in the aesthetic consciousness and has no practical consequences.

Has anyone remarked how at variance this aesthetic theory is with the theory upon which a great part of the French, Russian, and English fiction of the last seventy-five years has been constructed? 'What is man?' ask the novelists from Flaubert and Zola and Bourget to Thomas Hardy and Gissing and George Moore. 'A hoop rolled by a whimsical boy,' 'clay on the potter's wheel,' 'a figure of wax under the modeler's thumb.' With