Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/79

 Trojan Women. And Professor Hatfield has recently argued, in the Publications of the Modern Language Association, that Scott's novel, Anne of Geierstein, had practical consequences in certain features of that very practical body, the Ku Klux Klan.

The Greek dramatists let their audience know that much rough and lustful business goes on in this world. The reason why they did not actually present on the stage Clytemnestra with her axe braining Agamemnon in his bath was, I suppose, that with their customary clearness of insight into human nature they perceived that æsthetic experience is seldom or never pure. The effect of that violent stimulus to the nerves and imagination would be incalculable. Some spectator with the image working in his brain might mimic that dreadful action in a waking dream. There is little reason for assuming that the moral check which prevents æsthetic experience from overflowing into practical conduct is more highly developed in us than it was in the Athenians. Our reading public is not so free from Barbarians and Helots that we can afford wholly to disregard the psychological facts which appear to have convinced the most 'æsthetic' of peoples that the publishers of works of art are among the chief makers of public morals.

On the contrary, we have still, and are likely to have for a long time to come, an immense reading public of extraordinary naïveté. I think it is a fact at the present time that the average American of considerable general intelligence and edu-