But Wilde’s antithetic glitter, when used in journalism, may become the most wearisome thing on earth. We long, confronted by such a monotony of inversion as we get in Mr. G. K. Chesterton, for instance, for a plain “dull” statement. In the same way, if the villainous stupidity that has always been around every man since the world began (only he has belaboured it with one hand while caressing it with the other) became something like the religion of the educated--such education, that is, as enabled you to enjoy it--and its pursuit and enjoyment the one topic and habit of life, should we not sigh for the old variety; the hero, the villain, the lovely lady and the Comic Relief? Should we not also, if embedded in some bric-à-brac of stuffed birds and wax flowers, and the languors of the “æsthetic period” of the article I cite later in this pamphlet, look towards Karnak, a plain French provincial town, or almost anywhere--with eyes of longing? Surely all this sensibility of the “queer,” the “amusing,” the divinely ugly, the exquisitely vulgar, will date, and date very quickly. There would to-day, in the “modern” section of the art-world, be as great an outcry if some philistine proposed that the lovely embellishments of our streets, coloured signs, posters, beautiful police-stations and bewitching tiled Tube stations should be pulled down, as there would have been formerly, and is still by the “beauty-loving public,” when some “picturesque old bit” or decaying cottage is removed. But, with men trying their hardest to eliminate ugliness, injustice, imbecility and so forth from the world, has there ever been any absence of these commodities for the sweet, or bitter, tooth of the artist? Is there ever likely to be? It is true that the artist can gorge himself to-day probably as never before. But is that the best thing for his talent? If twenty Christs charged abreast anywhere in the world, you would still get in a remarkably short time, and within a half-hour’s walk of their super-calvary, some such monument as the First Pyramid, the result of such a block of egotism as had never been seen before, to show you the weakness of the humane corrective. But I do not believe you would ever get a pyramid builder without Christian hysteria. Even in order to appreciate the “banal” you must not have too much of it. And you must _pretend_ you do not like it even if you are incapable of liking anything else. The reactionary Prussian theorists of war--good, beneficent war--tyranny, and so forth were less useful than the Pacifist, and less intelligent.