s to
create their masterpieces, it is also necessary for them to find an
echo in the public, and be understood by them. The two phenomena go
hand in hand, as supply and demand. When the sentiment of art is low
among the public, the quality of the artistic production is also low,
and inversely. Professor Behrens, director of the Industrial School of
Art at Dusseldorf, is in complete accord with me in the debasing
effect of alcohol on the artistic sentiment. (_Alkohol und Kunst._)

After establishing these facts, we return to the fundamental but
delicate question: How is true erotic art to be distinguished from the
pornographic? While certain ascetic and fanatical preachers of
morality would burn and destroy all the erotic creations of art under
the pretext that they are pornographic, other disciples of decadence
defend the most ignoble pornography under the shield of art.

I will cite two examples which have already been mentioned previously
(Chapter XIII). In a very primitive and bigoted region of the Tyrol,
certain undraped, but very innocent, statues of women were erected in
the streets. Feeling their modesty deeply wounded, and regarding the
representation of the natural human body as a great inducement to
misconduct, the peasants of the district broke up these statues. The
same with the captain of police at Zurich, who made himself notorious
by ordering the removal of the picture by Boecklin, entitled "The
Sport of the Waves," regarding the two mermaids in the picture as a
danger to the morality and virtue of the citizens of Zurich!

I designate by the term charlatanism, everything which consists in
decorating or covering by the term art, all possible perversions of
pornography, often pathological. Persons of artistic nature, dominated
by emotional sentiments, will no doubt be excused for being often
overexcited to a more or less pathological degree, for executing all
kinds of fantastic vagaries in their sexual life, and for being
capricious and excessive in love. These things are almost inseparable
from the artistic temperament. But the systematic education of
pornography, and the sexual orgies which are cynically made public, go
decidedly beyond what is licit, and cannot be included in the scope of
art without degrading it. The individual and pathological failings of
artists and the eccentricities to which they often become victims,
must not be confounded with art and its products.

On the other hand, we often