glorious comedies and tragedies out of its inordinate crimes and cruelties,
and its pathetic follies and fatuities. But people didn't like it, and they
turned Puritan and closed the theaters. It is true, they repented, and
opened them again; but the theater had got a bad name from which it is only
now beginning to recover.

In the fields of poetry and fiction a more long-drawn-out contest ensued
between, those who wanted to tell the truth and those who wanted to listen
to pleasant fibs, the latter generally having the best of it. The contest
finally settled down into the Victorian compromise, which was tacitly
accepted by even the best of the imaginative writers of the period. The
understanding was that brutality, lust and selfishness were to be
represented as being qualities only of "bad" people, plainly labelled as
such. Under this compromise some magnificent works were produced. But
inasmuch as the compromise involved a suppression of a great and
all-important fact about the human soul, it could not endure forever. The
only question was, under what influences would the revolt occur?

It occurred, as George Moore's quite typical and naïvely illuminating
confessions reveal, under French influences. Something of the same sort had
been happening in France, and the English rebels found exemplars of revolt
ready to their need. These French rebels were of all sorts, and it was
naturally the most extreme that attracted the admiration of the English
malcontents. Chief among these were Gautier and Baudelaire.

Gautier had written in "Mademoiselle de Maupin" a lyrical exaltation of the
joys of the flesh: he had eloquently and unreservedly pronounced the
fleshly pleasures _good_. Baudelaire had gone farther: he had said
that Evil was beautiful, the most beautiful thing in the world--and proved
it, to those who were anxious to believe it, by writing beautiful poems