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This urging me, forcing me to appeal to Society for help, is one of the things that make me despise you so much, that make me despise myself so much for having yielded to you. Your not appreciating me as an artist was quite excusable. It was temperamental. You couldn’t help it. But you might have appreciated me as an Individualist. For that no culture was required. But you didn’t, and so you brought the element of Philistinism into a life that had been a complete protest against it, and from some points of view a complete annihilation of it. The Philistine element in life is not the failure to understand Art. Charming people such as fishermen, shepherds, ploughboys, peasants and the like know nothing about Art, and are the very salt of the earth. He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind mechanical of Society, and who does not recognise the dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a movement.
怂恿我、逼迫我向社会求助，这是许多事情中的一件，使我如此看你不起，也使我因为迁就你而如此看自己不起。你不欣赏作为艺术家的我，情有可原。那是气质使然。你也没办法。但你本可以欣赏作为自为主义者的我。因为这并不需要任何文化修养。可你并不这样做，所以就把市侩的平庸带进了一个曾一心一意与这平庸抗争、以某些观点看是把它扫荡净尽了的生命。生命中的平庸并不意味着对艺术不理解。可爱的人们如渔夫、牧人、农民之辈，他们一点也不懂得艺术，可正是人群中的佼佼者。是市侩庸人的，倒是那些坚持并襄助社会那笨重冥顽、盲目机械的力量，而对一个人或一项运动的内在活力视而不见的人。
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