tions included a poetic obscenity with easy
nonchalance. They had a god to protect its interests, and its
sun-burnt youthful wantonness penetrates all their art. This modern cult
of "decency"--thrust down the throat of human joy by a set of
Calvins and John Knoxes--is only one of the indications in our
wretched commercialised age of how far we have sunk from the
laughter of the gods and the dancing of the morning stars.

To sit listening in the forlorn streets of a Puritan city--when for one
day the cheating tradesmen leave their barbarous shops--to the
wailing of unlovely hymns, empty of everything except a degraded
sentimentality that would make an Athenian or a Roman slave blush
with shame, is enough to cause one to regard the most scandalous
levity of Voltaire as something positively sacred and holy.

One wonders that scholars are any longer allowed even to read
Aristophanes--far less translate him. And cannot they see--these
perverts of a purity that insults the sunshine--that _humour,_ decent
or indecent, is precisely the thing that puts sex properly in its place?
Cannot they see that by substituting morbid sentiment for honest
Rabelaisianism they are obsessing the minds of every one with a
matter which after all is only one aspect of life?

The great terrible Aphrodite--ruler of gods and men--is not to be
banished by conventicle or council. She will find her way back,
though she has to tread strange paths, and the punishment for the
elimination of natural wantonness is the appearance of hideous
hypocrisy. Driven from the haunts of the Muses, expelled from the
symposia of the wise and witty, the spirit of sexual irreverence takes
refuge in the streets; and the scurrilous vulgarities of the tavern
balance the mincing proprieties of the book-shop.

After all sex _is_ a laughable thing. The tragedies connected with it,
the high and thrilling pleasures connected with it, do not obliterate
its original absurdity. And Voltaire--this sane sun-born child of the
shameless intellect--never permits us for a moment to forget how
ridiculous in the last resort all this fuss about the matter is.

Puritanical suppression and neurotic obsession are found invariably
together. It is precisely in this way that the great goddess revenges
herself upon those who disobey her laws. Voltaire, the least
Puritanical of men, is also the least neurotic. The Satyrish laughter
of his eternally youthful energy clears the air of the world.