caressing meaninglessness that is at the heart of poetry. Women are
far more responsive to such things than men, who are ordinarily
quite as devoid of aesthetic sensitiveness as so many oxen. The
attitude of the typical man toward beauty in its various forms is, in
fact, an attitude of suspicion and hostility. He does not regard a
work of art as merely inert and stupid; he regards it as, in some
indefinable way, positively offensive. He sees the artist as a
professional voluptuary and scoundrel, and would no more trust him
in his household than he would trust a coloured clergyman in
his hen-yard. It was men, and not women, who invented such
sordid and literal faiths as those of the Mennonites, Dunkards,
Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antipathy to
beautiful ritual, their obscene buttonholing of God, their great talent
for reducing the ineffable mystery of religion to a mere bawling of
idiots. The normal woman, in so far as she has any religion at all,
moves irresistibly toward Catholicism, with its poetical
obscurantism. The evangelical Protestant sects have a hard time
holding her. She can no more be an actual Methodist than a
gentleman can be a Methodist.


This inclination toward beauty, of course, is dismissed by the
average male blockhead as no more than a feeble sentimentality.
The truth is that it is precisely the opposite. It is surely not
sentimentality to be moved by the stately and mysterious ceremony
of the mass, or even, say, by those timid imitations of it which one
observes in certain Protestant churches. Such proceedings,
whatever their defects from the standpoint of a pure aesthetic, are at
all events vastly more beautiful than any of the private acts of
the folk who take part in them. They lift themselves above the