“As door-nails, sir. They regarded life as a thing to be enjoyed--a vice you will not have noticed in the British. The Greeks were an outdoor people, who lived in the sun and the fresh air, and had none of the niceness bred by the life of our towns. We have long been renowned for our delicacy about the body; nor has the tendency been decreased by constituting Watch Committees of young persons in every borough. These are now the arbiters of art, and nothing unsuitable to the child of seven passes their censorship.” “How careful!” said the Angel. “The result has been wonderful,” remarked his dragoman. “Wonderful!” he repeated, dreamily. “I suppose there is more smouldering sexual desire and disease in this country than in any other.” “Was that the intention?” asked the Angel. “Oh! no, sir! That is but the natural effect of so remarkably pure a surface. All is within instead of without. Nature has now wholly disappeared. The process was sped-up by the Great Skirmish. For, since then, we have had little leisure and income to spare on the gratification of anything but laughter; this and the ‘unco guid’ have made our art-surface glare in the eyes of the nations, thin and spotless as if made of tin.” The Angel raised his eyebrows. “I had hoped for better things,” he said. “You must not suppose, sir,” pursued his dragoman, “that there is not plenty of the undraped, so long as it is vulgar, as you saw just now upon the stage, for that is good business; the line is only drawn at the danger-point of art, which is always very bad business in this country. Yet even in real life the undraped has to be grotesque to be admitted; the one fatal quality is natural beauty. The laugh, sir, the laugh--even the most hideous and vulgar laugh--is such a disinfectant. I should, however, say in justice to our literary men, that they have not altogether succumbed to the demand for cachinnations. A school, which first drew breath before the Great Skirmish began, has perfected itself, till now we have whole tomes where hardly a sentence would be intelligible to any save the initiate; this enables them to defy the Watch Committees, with other Philistines. We have writers who mysteriously preach the realisation of self by never considering anybody else; of purity through experience of exotic vice; of courage through habitual cowardice; and of kindness through Prussian behaviour. They are generally young. We have others whose fiction consists of autobiography interspersed with philosophic and political fluencies. These may be of any age from eighty odd to the bitter thirties. We have also the copious and chatty novelist; and transcribers of the life of the Laborious, whom the Laborious never read. Above all, we have the great Patriotic school, who put the national motto first, and write purely what is good for trade. In fact, we have every sort, as in the old days.” “It would appear,” said the Angel, “that the arts have stood somewhat still.”