ABSTRACT
Strachey read his first Apostles paper, 'Ought the Father to Grow a Beard?', to the society on 10 May 1902. In it, he examines the general topics of the 'conversation' between artists and life and of the 'limits of art'. Specifically, he explores both a moral question and a purely aesthetic one – respectively, 'whether there may not be some parts of life with which the artist should never deal', and 'whether there is any subject which is per se incapable of artistic treatment'. The spirit of paganism may in fact be taken as the complete antithesis to the spirit of the modern worldpresent day. It was anti-socialistic, for its political conceptions were based on slavery, and it was anti-christian, for it valued most precisely those qualities – such as courage, pride, cunning, beauty, etc. – which the progress of Christianity inevitably tends to abolish altogether.
