Silhouettes

TO KATHERINE WILLARD, NOW KATHERINE BALDWIN.
Paris: May, 1892. London: February, 1896.
The Preface, and the nineteen Poems marked with an asterisk, were not contained in the first edition. One Poem has been omitted, and many completely rewritten.
AN ingenuous reviewer once described some verses of mine as “unwholesome,” because, he said, they had “a faint smell of Patchouli about them.” I am a little sorry he chose Patchouli, for that is not a particularly favourite scent with me. If he had only chosen Peau d’Espagne, which has a subtle meaning, or Lily of the Valley, with which I have associations! But Patchouli will serve. Let me ask, then, in republishing, with additions, a collection of little pieces, many of which have been objected to, at one time or another, as being somewhat deliberately frivolous, why art should not, if it please, concern itself with the artificially charming, which, I suppose, is what my critic means by Patchouli? All art, surely, is a form of artifice, and thus, to the truly devout mind, condemned already, if not as actively noxious, at all events as needless. That is a point of view which I quite understand, and its conclusion I hold to be absolutely logical. I have the utmost respect for the people who refuse to read a novel, to go to the theatre, or to learn dancing. That is to have convictions and to live up to them. I understand also the point of view from which a work of art is tolerated in so far as it is actually militant on behalf of a religious or a moral idea. But what I fail to understand are those delicate, invisible degrees by which a distinction is drawn between this form of art and that; the hesitations, and compromises, and timorous advances, and shocked retreats, of the Puritan conscience once emancipated, and yet afraid of liberty. However you may try to convince yourself to the contrary, a work of art can be judged only from two standpoints: the standpoint from which its art is measured entirely by its morality, and the standpoint from which its morality is measured entirely by its art.