“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----” “Good God!” burst out Annan, “--what has this to do with my novel----” “It’s tainted. It’s infected with the cult of ugliness. So were your short stories in the _Planet_ that gave you a name! You’re stained with modernism.” “Damn it, I’m personally decent----” “Some of the lunatics are, too. But the hullabaloo they’re making is bound to affect--and infect--impressionable minds. All healthy and creative minds are impressionable. Yours is. This satanic cult of ugliness has influenced your mind to more sombre, more incredulous, less wholesome creations. “All genius is imitative in some degree. You don’t escape, Barry. The body-vermin of literature--the so-called modern critics--all are applauding you and tempting you to perpetuate more of that sinister ugliness which deformed your first work. “Don’t do it. Remember the real standards. They never change; only fashion changes. Stick to the clean master-jobs of the real giants in your profession. Those are the standards. Life is splendid. Man is fine. The beauty of both are best worth recording in art. Leave degeneracy to medicine. Leave modernism to the asylum. Make the cleavage definite between art and science. Find your themes in goodness, in beauty, in the nobility of the human mind----” “Good heavens, Mike, are you one of those moral fanatics who evoke blue-laws even for literature?”