White Stains

6 PREFACE run, is eminently sane and practical ; under the Second Empire it ran mad. If these things are done in the green tree of Society, what shall be done in the dry tree of Bohemianism ? Art always has a suspicion to fight against ; always some poor mad Max Nordau is handy to call everything outside the kitchen the asy- lum. Here, however, there is a substratum of truth. Consider the intolerable long roll of names, all tainted with glorious madness. Baudelaire the diabolist, debauchee of sadism, whose dreams are night mares, and whose waking hours delirium ; Rollinat the necro- phile, the poet of phthisis, the anxiomaniac ; Péladan, the high priest—of nonsense ; Mendés, frivolous and scoffing sensualist ; besides a host of others, most alike in this, that, below the cloak of madness and depravity, the true heart of genius burns. No more terrible pe- riod than this is to be found in literature ; so many great minds, of which hardly one comes to fruition ; such seeds of genius, such a harvest of—whirlwind ! Even a barren waste of sea is less saddening than one strewn with wreckage. In England such wild song found few followers of any worth or melody. Swinburne stands on his solitary pedestal above the vulgar crowds of priapistic