he writer
attributed the "gross and vulgar conceptions of life which are
formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism."
Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so
far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded
with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of
our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been
overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness "vaporous," "miasmic,"
coming from a "fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown
westward," sucking up on its way "all that was most unwholesome from the
soil of France."

* In this summary, the pamphlet reprint has been followed in
preference to the original article as it appeared in the
Review.

Just previously to and contemporaneously with the rise of Dante, there
had flourished a legion of poets of greater or less ability, but all
more or less characterised by affectation, foolishness, and moral
blindness: singers of the falsetto school, with ballads to their
mistress's eyebrow, sonnets to their lady's lute, and general songs of a
fiddlestick; peevish men for the most part, as is the way of all fleshly
and affected beings; men so ignorant of human subjects and materials
as to be driven in their sheer bankruptcy of mind to raise Hope, Love,
Fear, Rage (everything but Charity) into human entities, and to
treat the body and upholstery of a dollish woman as if, in itself, it
constituted a whole universe.

After tracing the effect of the "moral poison" here seen in its
inception through English poetry from Surrey and Wyat to Cowley, the
writer recognised a "tranquil gleam of honest English light" in Cowper,
who "spread the seeds of new life" soon to re-appear in Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Scott. In his opinion the "Italian disease
would now have died out altogether," but for a "fresh importation of the
obnoxious matter from France."

At this stage came a denunciation of the representation of "abnormal
types of diseased lust and lustful disease" as seen in Charles
Baudelaire's _Fleurs de Mal_, with the conclusion that out of "the
hideousness of _Femmes Damnees_" came certain English poems. "This,"
said the writer, "is our double misfortune--to have a nuisance, and to
have it at second-hand. We might have been more tolerant to an unclean
thing if it had been in some sense a product of the soil" All that is
here summar