“It’s real music, Barry--not _this_!--” he struck a series of dissonant, ugly, half-crazed chords from the most modern creation of the most modern of modernists. “That’s diseased,” he said. “There is no virtue, no beauty, no art in disease.” “Of course,” remarked Annan, “I might mention ambergris, paté-de-fois-gras, the virtues of ergot, the play of colour, and the flower-like perfume of a dying grayling, and the----” “If you’re going to be flippant----” “No. Go on, Mike.” “Barry, do you understand the origin of this modern ‘revolt’--this sinister cult of dullness, perversity, ugliness? It was born in Bolshevism. Which is degeneracy. It is the worship of ugliness. It is known to scientists as Satanism. “Once the prisons and asylums were the ultimate destinations of the degenerate. Because degenerates, then, had no safe outlet in the fine arts. Their manifestations were matters for police control. “Now, they have their outlets in literature, drama, music, sculpture, painting. And their vicious or crazy creations profoundly impress The Great American Ass. Why? Because he’s ignorant, and art awes him. But he’s also, physically, a healthy beast, and he doesn’t understand the degeneracy that masquerades as art. “What is ugly, morbid, dull, rotten, cynical, pessimistic, is degenerate. To dwell upon disease in creative work is degeneracy. To seek out, analyse, celebrate, perpetuate ugliness, deformity, decay, is degeneracy. “Yet, that is modernism. That is the trend. That is what is being done. That is what the new generation of creative genius offers,--and what it calls realism,--a dreary multiplicity of photographic items; a sordid recapitulation of daily and meaningless details; inspiration from models of distorted minds and bodies; ugliness lovingly delved for and dragged out into clean sunshine; triumphant exposure of the mentally, morally, and physically crippled. “But there is the worse phenomenon--the degenerate writer, painter, sculptor, who sees ugliness in beauty, decay in health, atrophy in the normal,--and who caricatures the healthy and beautiful living model to evolve the ugly and obscene spectres that haunt his brain. “Such are the so-called modernists. Their outer limit inside the bounds of sanity are Manet and Degas. “Beyond that is the bedlam of Cezanne and Gauguin----” “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!