compromise about what should happen behind the scenes and what on the
stage. Dickens did not claim the license of diction Fielding might have
claimed in repeating the senile ecstasies of Gride (let us say) over his
purchased bride: but Dickens does not leave the reader in the faintest
doubt about what sort of feelings they were; nor is there any reason why
he should. Thackeray would not have described the toilet details of the
secret balls of Lord Steyne: he left that to Lady Cardigan. But no one
who had read Thackeray's version would be surprised at Lady Cardigan's.
But though the great Victorian novelists would not have permitted the
impudence of the suggestion that every part of their problem must be
wholesome and innocent in itself, it is still tenable (I do not say it
is certain) that by yielding to the Philistines on this verbal
compromise, they have in the long run worked for impurity rather than
purity. In one point I do certainly think that Victorian Bowdlerism did
pure harm. This is the simple point that, nine times out of ten, the
coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the
word that excuses it. A common evasion, for instance, substitutes for
the word that brands self-sale as the essential sin, a word which weakly
suggests that it is no more wicked than walking down the street. The
great peril of such soft mystifications is that extreme evils (they
that are abnormal even by the standard of evil) have a very long start.
Where ordinary wrong is made unintelligible, extraordinary wrong can
count on remaining more unintelligible still; especially among those who
live in such an atmosphere of long words. It is a cruel comment on the
purity of the Victorian Age, that the age ended (save for the bursting
of a single scandal) in a thing being everywhere called "Art," "The
Greek Spirit," "The Platonic Ideal" and so on--which any navvy mending
the road outside would have stamped with a word as vile and as vulgar as
it deserved.