To each the existence of laws
is equally essential. For profligacy is not merely the gratification of
the appetites, but the gratification of them at the expense of something
else. Beasts are not profligate. We cannot have a profligate goat.

In what I have called concupiscent art, the case might seem different,
and to a certain extent it is so. The objects of struggle that we are
there presented with are meant to be presented as pleasures, not in
defiance of right and wrong, but independently of them. The chief of
these, indeed, as Theophile Gautier has told us, are the physical
endearments of a man and a woman, with no other qualification than that
they are both of them young and beautiful. But though this art professes
to be thus independent of the moral judgment, and to trust for none of
its effects to the discernment between good and evil, this really is
very far from being the case. Let us turn once again to the romance we
have already quoted from. The hero says, as we have seen already, that
he has completely lost the power of discernment in question. Now, even
this, as might be shown easily, is not entirely true; for argument's
sake, however, we may grant him that it is so. The real point in the
matter to notice is that he is at any rate conscious of the loss. He is
a man tingling with the excitement of having cast off some burden. The
burden may be gone, but it is still present in the sharp effects of its
absence. He is a kind of moral poacher, who, though he may not live by
law, takes much of his life's tone from the sense that he is eluding it.
His pleasures, though pleasurable in themselves, yet have this quality
heightened by the sense of contrast. '_I am at any rate not virtuous_,'
his mistress says to him, '_and that is always something gained_.'
George Eliot says of Maggie Tulliver, that she liked her aunt Pullet
chiefly because she was not her aunt Gleg. Theophile Gautier's hero
likes the Venus Anadyomene, partly at least, because she is not the
Madonna.

Nay, let us even descend to worse spectacles--to the sight of men
struggling for enjoyments that are yet more obviously material, more
devoid yet of any trace of mind or morals, and we shall see plainly, if
we consult the mirror of art, that the moral element is present even
here. We shall trace it even in such abnormal literature of indulgence
as the erotic work commonly ascribed to Meursius. We shall trace it in
the orgies of Tiberius at Capri; or