es him to
collect gold from places seemly and unseemly, even to the point of
digging up a corpse in order to extract the gold filling from its teeth.
There is the insane French Chief of Police, who commits a murder and
attempts to disguise the body, and the nature of the crime, by
substituting the head of a guillotined criminal for that of the victim.
In another story we have the picture of a cheerful teetotaller who
suffers from drink and suicidal mania. There is also a doctor who kills
a mad poet, and a mad priest who drops a hammer from the top of his
church-tower upon his brother. Another story is about the loathsome
treachery of an English general. It is, of course, difficult to write
about crime without touching on features which revolt the squeamish
reader, but it can be done, and it has been done, as in the Sherlock
Holmes stories. There are subjects about which one instinctively feels
it is not good to know too much. Sex, for example, is one of them.
Strindberg, Weininger, Maupassant, Jules de Goncourt, knew too much
about sex, and they all went mad, although it is usual to disguise the
fact in the less familiar terms of medical science. Madness itself is
another such subject. There are writers who dwell on madness because
they cannot help themselves--Strindberg, Edgar Allan Poe, Gogol, and
many others--but they scarcely produce the same nauseating sensation as
the sudden introduction of the note of insanity into a hitherto normal
setting. The harnessing of the horror into which the discovery of
insanity reacts is a favourite device of the feeble craftsman, but it is
illegitimate. It is absolutely opposed to those elementary canons of
good taste which decree that we may not jest at the expense of certain
things, either because they are too sacred or not sacred enough. The
opposite of a decadent author is not necessarily a writer who attacks
decadents. Many decadents have attacked themselves, by committing
suicide, for example. The opposite of a decadent author is one to whom
decadent ideas and imagery are alien, which is a very different thing.
For example, the whole story _The Wrong Shape_ is filled with decadent
ideas; one is sure that Baudelaire would have entirely approved of it.
It includes a decadent poet, living in wildly Oriental surroundings,
attended by a Hindoo servant. Even the air of the place is decadent;
Father Brown on entering the house learns instinctively from it that a
crime is to be committe