o me faults of treatment, and even of conception, quite
independent of those already mentioned.

The main one is somewhat "tickle of the sere" to handle. It has been
said that, despite its alarming title, there is nothing in the book that
even prudery, unless it were of the most irritable and morbid kind,
could object to. There is no dwelling on what Defoe ingeniously calls
"the vicious part" of the matter; there is no description of it closer
than, if as close as, some passages of the Book of Proverbs (which are
actually quoted), and, above all, there is no hint of any satisfaction
whatever being derived from the sins by the sinner. His course in this
respect might have been a succession of fits of vertigo or epilepsy as
far as pleasure goes. There is even a rather fine piece of real
psychology as to his state of mind after his first succumbing to
temptation. But all this abstinence and reticence, however laudable in a
sense it may be, necessarily deprives the passages of anything but
purely psychological interest, and leaves most of them not much of that.
Luxury _in vacuo_ may, no doubt, be perilous to the culprit; but it has,
for others, nearly as much of the unreal and chimerical as Gluttony
confined to "Second intentions."

Yet there is another objection to _Volupte_ which is even more closely
"psychological," and which has been indicated in the word
"parallelement," suggested by, though largely transposed from,
Verlaine's use thereof in a title. There is no connection
established--there is even, it may seem, a great gulf fixed between
Amaury's actual "loves" for Amelie de Liniers, for Lucy de Couaen, and
even for the more questionable Madame R., and those "sippings of the
lower draught" which are so industriously veiled. If Amaury had
"disdamaged" himself, for his inability to possess any of his real and
superior loves, by lower indulgences, it would have been discreditable
but human. But there is certainly no expression--there is, unless I
mistake, hardly any suggestion--of anything of the kind. The currents of
spiritual and animal passion seem to have run independently of each
other, like canals at different heights on the slope of a hill. I do not
know that this is less discreditable; but it seems to me infinitely less
human. And, while carefully abstaining from any attempt to connect the
peculiarity with the above-mentioned scandals about Sainte-Beuve's life
and conversation in detail, one may suggest that it