Now listen to the fatidical Pole Przybyszewski:  “In the beginning there was sex, out of sex there was nothing and in it everything was.  And sex made itself brain whence was the birth of the soul.”  And then, as Mr. Vance Thompson, who first Englished this “Mass of the Dead”—­wrote:  “He pictures largely in great cosmic symbols, decorated with passionate and mystic fervors, the singular combat between the growing soul and the sex from which it fain would be free.”  Arno Holz thus parodies Przybyszewski:  “In our soul there is surging and singing a song of the victorious bacteria.  Our blood lacks the white corpuscles.  On the sounding board of our consciousness there echoes along the frightful symphony of the flesh.  It becomes objective in Chopin; he alone, the modern primeval man, puts our brains on the green meadows, he alone thinks in hyper-European dimensions.  He alone rebuilds the shattered Jerusalem of our souls."All of which shows to what comically delirious lengths this sort of deleterious soul-probing may go.

It would be well to consider this word “decadent” and its morbid implications.  There is a fashion just now in criticism to over-accentuate the physical and moral weaknesses of the artist.  Lombroso started the fashion, Nordau carried it to its logical absurdity, yet it is nothing new.  In Hazlitt’s day he complains, that genius is called mad by foolish folk.  Mr. Newman writes in his Wagner, that “art in general, and music in particular, ought not to be condemned merely in terms of the physical degeneration or abnormality of the artist.  Some of the finest work in art and literature, indeed, has been produced by men who could not, from any standpoint, be pronounced normal.  In the case of Flaubert, of De Maupassant, of Dostoievsky, of Poe, and a score of others, though the organic system was more or less flawed, the work remains touched with that universal quality that gives artistic permanence even to perceptions born of the abnormal.”  Mr. Newman might have added other names to his list, those of Michael Angelo and Beethoven and Swinburne.  Really, is any great genius quite sane according to philistine standards?  The answer must be negative.  The old enemy has merely changed his mode of attack:  instead of charging genius with madness, the abnormal used in an abnormal sense is lugged in and though these imputations of degeneracy, moral and physical, have in some cases proven true, the genius of the accused one can in no wise be denied.  But then as Mr. Philip Hale asks:  Why this timidity at being called decadent?  What’s in the name?

Havelock Ellis in his masterly study of Joris Karl Huysmans, considers the much misunderstood phenomenon in art called decadence.  “Technically a decadent style is only such in relation to a classic style.  It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further specialization, the homogeneous in Spencerian phraseology having become heterogeneous.  The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated