It is we shrinkingly aesthetic creatures who conjure up by a mere effort of
the imagination what these blunt folks cannot conceive without gross
visual stimulants. That is because they have not enjoyed our advantages;
they are not civilized. Among other things, they have not gone through a
"reformation." Take a northern stock, sound in mind and body; infuse into
it a perverse disrespect for the human frame and other anti-rational
whimsies; muddle the whole, once more, by a condiment of Hellenistic
renaissance and add, as crowning flavour, puritan "conscience" and
"sinfulness"--mix up, in a general way, good nourishment with ascetic
principles--and you will attain to a capacity of luxuriance in certain
matters that may well be the envy and despair of poor primitives like the
Arabs.
Extremes meet. Performances such as these are beyond good and evil. They
are for the wholly savage or the wholly civilized. We complain
considerably just now of the swamping of class distinctions in our lands,
but a man of culture has a prerogative to which the biliously moral middle
classes can never aspire: to be an Arab, when it suits him.
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