For me, personally, it has a slight,
vague repercussion upon literature. The attitude of the culture of London
towards it is of course merely humiliating to any Englishman who has made
an effort to cure himself of insularity. It is one more proof that the
negligent disdain of Continental artists for English artistic opinion is
fairly well founded. The mild tragedy of the thing is that London is
infinitely too self-complacent even to suspect that it is London and not
the exhibition which is making itself ridiculous. The laughter of London
in this connexion is just as silly, just as provincial, just as obtuse, as
would be the laughter of a small provincial town were Strauss's "Salome,"
or Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande" offered for its judgment. One can
imagine the shocked, contemptuous resentment of a London musical amateur
(one of those that arrived at Covent Garden box-office at 6 a.m. the other
day to secure a seat for "Salome") at the guffaw of a provincial town
confronted by the spectacle and the noise of the famous "Salome"
osculation. But the amusement of that same amateur confronted by an
uncompromising "Neo-Impressionist" picture amounts to exactly the same
guffaw. The guffaw is legal. You may guffaw before Rembrandt (people do!),
but in so doing you only add to the sum of human stupidity.
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