new still, though it is already dying. The tradition of calling
a spade a spade starts very early in our literature and comes
down very late. But the truth is that the ordinary honest man,
whatever vague account he may have given of his feelings, was not
either disgusted or even annoyed at the candour of the moderns.
What disgusted him, and very justly, was not the presence
of a clear realism, but the absence of a clear idealism.
Strong and genuine religious sentiment has never had any objection
to realism; on the contrary, religion was the realistic thing,
the brutal thing, the thing that called names. This is the great
difference between some recent developments of Nonconformity and
the great Puritanism of the seventeenth century. It was the whole
point of the Puritans that they cared nothing for decency.
Modern Nonconformist newspapers distinguish themselves by suppressing
precisely those nouns and adjectives which the founders of Nonconformity
distinguished themselves by flinging at kings and queens.
But if it was a chief claim of religion that it spoke plainly about evil,
it was the chief claim of all that it spoke plainly about good.
The thing which is resented, and, as I think, rightly resented,
in that great modern literature of which Ibsen is typical,
is that while the eye that can perceive what are the wrong things
increases in an uncanny and devouring clarity, the eye which sees
what things are right is growing mistier and mistier every moment,
till it goes almost blind with doubt. If we compare, let us say,
the morality of the DIVINE COMEDY with the morality of Ibsen's GHOSTS,
we shall see all that modern ethics have really done.
No one, I imagine, will accuse the author of the INFERNO
of an Early Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian optimism.
But Dante describes three moral instruments--Heaven, Purgatory,
and Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement,