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.
This reticence, right or wrong, may have been connected with the
participation of women with men in the matter of fiction.
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