would be thought of a French magistrate or a German magistrate who ordered a fair translation of “Hamlet” or of “Lear” to be burnt, because of its obscenity?  He would be regarded as demented.  One can only understand such a judgment as an isolated fact.  But in England this monstrous stupidity is the rule.  Sir A. de Rutzen was not satisfied with ordering the books to be burnt and fining the bookseller; he went on to justify his condemnation and praise the police: 

“It is perfectly clear to my mind that a more foul and filthy black spot has not been found in London for a long time, and the police have done uncommonly well in bringing the matter to light.  I consider that the books are likely to do a great deal of harm.”

Fancy the state of mind of the man who can talk such poisonous nonsense; who, with the knowledge of what Piccadilly is at night in his mind, can speak of the translation of a masterpiece as one of the “most filthy black spots” to be found in London.  To say that such a man is insane is, I suppose, going too far; but to say that he does not know the value or the meaning of the words he uses, to say that he is driven by an extraordinary and brainless prejudice, is certainly the modesty of truth.

It is this sort of perversity on the part of Sir A. de Rutzen and of nine out of ten Englishmen that makes Frenchmen, Germans and Italians speak of them as ingrained hypocrites.  But they are not nearly so hypocritical as they are uneducated and unintelligent, rebellious to the humanising influence of art and literature.  The ordinary Englishman would much prefer to be called an athlete than a poet.  The Puritan Commonwealth Parliament ordered the pictures of Charles I. to be sold, but such of them as were indecent to be burnt; accordingly half a dozen Titians were solemnly burnt and the nucleus of a great national gallery destroyed.  One can see Sir A. de Rutzen solemnly assisting at this holocaust and devoutly deciding that all the masterpieces which showed temptingly a woman’s beautiful breasts were “foul and filthy black spots” and must be burnt as harmful.  Or rather one can see that Sir A. de Rutzen has in two and a half centuries managed to get a little beyond this primitive Puritan standpoint:  he might allow a pictorial masterpiece to-day to pass unburnt, but a written masterpiece is still to him anathema.

A part of this prejudice comes from the fact that the English have a special dislike for every form of sexual indulgence.  It is not consistent with their ideal of manhood, and, like the poor foolish magistrate, they have not yet grasped the truth, which one might have thought the example of the Japanese would have made plain by now to the dullest, that a nation may be extraordinarily brave, vigorous and self-sacrificing and at the same time intensely sensuous, and sensitive to every refinement of passion.  If the great English middle class were as well educated as the German middle class, such a judgment as this of Sir A. de Rutzen would be scouted as ridiculous and absurd, or rather would be utterly unthinkable.