It is not consistent with their ideal of manhood, and, like the poor foolish magistrate, they have not yet grasped the truth, which one might have thought the example of the Japanese would have made plain by now to the dullest, that a nation may be extraordinarily brave, vigorous and self-sacrificing and at the same time intensely sensuous, and sensitive to every refinement of passion.

If the great English middle class were as well educated as the German middle class, such a judgment as this of Sir A.de Rutzen would be scouted as ridiculous and absurd, or rather would be utterly unthinkable.
In Anglo-Saxon countries both the artist and the sexual passion are under a ban.

The race is more easily moved martially than amorously and it regards its overpowering combative instincts as virtuous just as it is apt to despise what it likes to call "languishing love." The poet Middleton couldn't put his dream city in England--a city of fair skies and fairer streets: And joy was there; in all the city's length I saw no fingers trembling for the sword; Nathless they doted on their bodies' strength, That they might gentler be.

Love was their lord.
Both America and England to-day offer terrifying examples of the despotism of an unenlightened and vulgar public opinion in all the highest concerns of man--in art, in literature and in religion.

There is no despotism on earth so soul-destroying to the artist: it is baser and more degrading than anything known in Russia.