her. She hides nothing; for modesty was only made for those who have no
beauty. It is an invention of the modern world; the child of the
Christian contempt for form and matter._

'_Oh ancient world! all that you held in reverence is held in scorn by
us. Thine idols are overthrown in the dust; fleshless anchorites clad in
rags and tatters, martyrs with the blood fresh on them, and their
shoulders torn by the tigers of thy circuses, have perched themselves on
the pedestals of thy fair desirable gods. The Christ has enveloped the
whole world in his winding-sheet.... Oh purity, plant of bitterness,
born on a blood-soaked soil, and whose degenerate and sickly blossom
expands with difficulty in the dank shade of cloisters, under a chill
baptismal rain; rose without scent, and spiked all round with thorns,
thou hast taken the place for us of the glad and gracious roses, bathed
with nard and wine, of the dancing girls of Sybaris!_

'_The ancient world knew thee not, oh sterile flower! thou wast never
enwoven in its chaplets of delirious perfume. In that vigorous and
healthy society they would have spurned thee under foot disdainfully.
Purity, mysticism, melancholy--three words unknown to thee, three new
maladies brought into our life by the Christ!... For me, I look on
woman in the old world manner, like a fair slave, made only for our
pleasures. Christianity, in my eyes, has done nothing to rehabilitate
her.... To say the truth, I cannot conceive for what reason there should
be this desire in woman to be looked on as on a level with men.... I
have made some love-verses in my time, or at least something that
aspired to pass for such ... and there is not a vestige in them of the
modern feeling of love.... There is nothing there, as in all the
love-poetry since the Christian era, of a soul which, because it loves,
begs another soul to love it back again; nothing there of a blue and