that Ariosto and Byron are sometimes
immoral. The man is not a libertine, but a realist. He wishes people to
live clean lives; all he says is, that everything which is legitimate,
innocent, necessary in life, is also legitimate and innocent in
literature. And although I should rather select other subjects to write
about, and would rather he did so likewise, I cannot deny that there is
logic in saying that there can be no harm in speaking of that which
there is no harm in doing."

"Yes," said Baldwin, "that is just the argument of such men. And the
answer is simply that there are things which are intended to be done and
_not_ to be spoken about. What you call logic is no logic at all, but
a mere appeal to ignorance. It so happens that the case is exactly
reversed--that there are a great many things which there is not the
smallest immorality in speaking about, and which it would be the most
glaring immorality to do. No one shrinks from talking about murder or
treachery; nay, even in the very domain of sexual relations there need
not be the smallest immorality, nothing at all perverting, in a play
which, like the whole Orestes trilogy, or _Othello_, or _Faust_, turns
upon adultery or seduction; no one also has the slightest instinct of
immorality in talking about the most fearful wholesale massacres. Yet
the world at large, ever since it has had any ideas of good and evil,
has had an instinct of immorality in talking of that without which not
one of us would exist, that which society sanctions and the church
blesses. And this exactly because it is as natural as murder--of which
we speak freely--is the contrary. For, exactly because certain instincts
are so essential and indispensable, Nature has made them so powerful and
excitable; there is no fear of their being too dormant, but there is
fear of their being too active, and the consequences of their excess
are so hideously dangerous to Nature itself, so destructive of all the
higher powers, of all the institutions of humanity; the over-activity of
the impulses to which we owe our birth is so ruinous of all that for
which we are born, social, domestic, and intellectual good, nay, to
physical existence itself, that Nature even has found it necessary to
restrain them by a counter-instinct--purity, chastity--such as has not
been given us to counteract the other physical instincts, as that of
eating, which can at most injure an individual glutton, but not affect
the general soc