LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

medicos to go into it. What was wrong with the criticism was lack of
proportion.
HEALTH is MORE interesting than disease. Health is TOTAL. Beauty
is MORE interesting than distortion.
We have most of us been buffaloed, or at any rate the intelligentsia is
mostly an ass. NOT from having no brains, but simply from partialism
in the original sense of that word. Intelligentsia is mostly a nuisance
because it runs on snobisms and fragments.
At [the] age of 15 a consumptive gave me a copy of Salomé with
Beardsley’s illustrations. I cut ’em out, they were so ugly. But for more
than ten years of my life I considered this an act of genuine fanaticism. I
came to see the … damn it all, call ’em merits of Beardsley’s distortions.
GROANS from the effete, elite and superior sophomores.
Later a distorted but amiable female presented me coyly with an inferior
Beardsley, that is, a volume of distortions by a pink nailed esthete. The
significance of THAT act was apparent even to me. I don’t think it was
conscious on her part. The book probably gave her relief or comfort that
she could not have derived from Praxiteles or Botticelli. At any rate I
was older, and the drawings weren’t even good Beardsley. AND I wasn’t
interested in pathology. So I have never mentioned the incident before.
The medicos who started worrying about the disease behind modern art
were right. That is, they were RIGHT to worry. They were mostly silly
in their statements of detail, and this was due to ignorance, lack of
cultural heritage. But they were on the right line.
I affirm that future art criticism will be able to tell the component of
usury tolerance. How far the TOLERANCE of usury prevailed, or did
not prevail when a given picture was painted. Sense of design, precision
of LINE, will give way to interest in detail. Suggestion of luxury will