Now I should like, if I could do so, to explain clearly the effect of this satyr-songster upon my mind,—for I believe there are many women to whom his works have been deadlier than the deadliest poison, and far more soul-corrupting than any book of Zola’s or the most pernicious of modern French writers. At first I read the poems quickly, with a certain pleasure in the musical swing and jangle of rhythm, and without paying much attention to the subject-matter of the verse,—but presently, as though a lurid blaze of lightning had stripped a fair tree of its adorning leaves, my senses suddenly perceived the cruelty and sensuality concealed under the ornate language and persuasive rhymes,—and for a moment I paused in my reading, and closed my eyes, shuddering and sick at heart. Was human nature as base and abandoned as this man declared it to be? Was there no God but Lust? Were men and women lower and more depraved in their passions and appetites than the very beasts? I mused and dreamed,—I pored over the ‘Laus Veneris’—‘Faustine’ and ‘Anactoria,’ till I felt myself being dragged down to the level of the mind that conceived such outrages to decency,—I drank in the poet’s own fiendish [p 407] contempt of God, and I read over and over again his verses ‘Before a Crucifix’ till I knew them by heart;—till they rang in my brain as persistently as any nursery jingle, and drove my thoughts into as haughty a scorn of Christ and His teachings, as any unbelieving Jew. It is nothing to me now,—now, when without hope, or faith or love, I am about to take the final plunge into eternal darkness and silence,—but for the sake of those who have the comfort of a religion I ask, why, in a so-called Christian country, is such a hideous blasphemy as ‘Before a Crucifix’ allowed to circulate among the people without so much as one reproof from those who elect themselves judges of literature? I have seen many noble writers condemned unheard,—many have been accused of blasphemy, whose works tend quite the other way,—but these lines are permitted to work their cruel mischief unchecked, and the writer of them is glorified as though he were a benefactor to mankind. I quote them here, from bitter memory, that I may not be deemed as exaggerating their nature—
“So when our souls look back to thee,
They sicken, seeing against thy side,
Too foul to speak of or to see,
The leprous likeness of a bride,
Whose kissing lips through his lips grown
Leave their God rotten to the bone.
When we would see thee man, and know
What heart thou had’st towards man indeed,