But what if we _do not care for white_? What if we are so constituted
that its insipidity sickens _us_ as much as the most poisonous and
putrescent colours which Blake ever mixed to paint hell and sin? Nay,
if those grumous and speckly viscosities of evil green, orange, poppy
purple, and nameless hues, are the only things which give us any
pleasure?
Is it a reason, because you arcadian Optimists of Evolution extract,
or imagine you extract, some feeble satisfaction out of white, that we
should pretend to enjoy it, and the Antique and Outdoor Nature, and
Early Painters, and Mozart and Gluck, and all the whitenesses physical
and moral? You say we are abnormal, unwholesome, decaying; very good,
then why should we not get pleasure in decaying, unwholesome, and
abnormal things? We are like the poison-monger's daughter in Nathaniel
Hawthorne's story. Other people's poison is our meat, and we should be
killed by an antidote; that is to say, bored to death, which, in our
opinion, is very much worse.
To this kind of speech, common since the romantic and pre-Raphaelite
movement, and getting commoner with the spread of theories of
intellectual anarchy and nervous degeneracy, one is often tempted to
answer impatiently, "Get out of the way, you wretched young people;
don't you see that there isn't room or time for your posing?"
But unfortunately it is not all pose. There are a certain number of
people who really are _bored with white_; for whom, as a result of
constitutional morbidness, of nervous exhaustion, or of that very
disintegration of soul due to unwholesome æsthetic self-indulgence, to
the constant quest for violent artistic emotion, our soul's best food
has really become unpalatable and almost nauseous. These people cannot
live without spiritual opium or alcohol, although that opium or
alcohol is killing them by inches. It is absurd to be impatient with
them. All one can do is to let them go in peace to their undoing, and
hope that their example will be rather a warning than a model to
others.