lieve that they were sinister; they wanted you to be afraid of sin, as sin—that is, as something to be detested—and at the same time to celebrate it as something to be desired—an impossible moral position, sure to involve insincerity on one side or the other. How can you believe that sin is "the good" and at the same time believe it to be sin? From the point of view of the person who really believes in the sinfulness of the flesh and of the uncensored exercise of the intelligence, they are things to be sedulously shunned; from the point of view of the real pagan they do not become an issue at all. But Baudelaire had to pretend to believe in the Devil and at the same time spend his whole artistic life endeavouring to make the Devil attractive; and his successors followed his example.
This is why, I believe, the writers of the end of the century seem inevitably to be diminishing in stature. Who can read Les Fleurs du Mal, A Rebours, The Picture of Dorian Grey, or Swinburne's Poems and Ballads with the same enthusiasm as their contemporaries? The whole effectiveness of the things narrated depends upon one's being shocked by them and when the prejudices to be shocked have been removed the works of art are no longer exciting. I can think of only two writers of that period and school who escaped the moral confusion of the reaction against respectability: Beardsley and Verlaine. Beardsley did, to be sure, in his drawings, exploit the fascination of Evil, as evil; but he also wrote rather a remarkable unfinished romance called Venus and Tannhauser in which he does succeed in investing a sort of pagan world with the artificial graces of the 'nineties without allowing it to become darkened and tragic with the fumes of a burning orthodoxy; his Venus, unlike the Venus of Swinburne or the Harlot of Oscar Wilde, is not destructive and terrible, but girlish and agreeable. The orgies, the perversities, and the grotesqueries of her court are to her all natural and harmless; she approaches really much nearer the naïf corruption of the comedies and tales of the eighteenth century than anything to be found in Wilde. As for Verlaine, he vacillated unquestionably between "paganism" and piety; but, unlike Baudelaire, he did not try to be pagan and pious at the same time; when he was a faun he was completely a faun without any respectable compunctions. And in these moods he created a neo-eighteenth century erotic sceptical world rather like the world of Venus and Tannhauser.
Now Mr Van Vechten and Mr Firbank are also able to take their
