d madness.

He was a ribald and a scoffer in the presence of much that the world
holds sacred; but the most sacred thing of all--the _sanity of human
reason_--has never been more splendidly defended.

He mocked at the traditions of men; but he remains a champion of
man's highest prerogative. He turned the churches into indecent
ridicule; but wherever an honest man strikes at tyrannous
superstition, or a solitary "cultivator of his garden" strikes at stupid
mob-rule, one stone the more is added to that great "ecclesia" of
civilisation, which "Deo erexit Voltaire"; which Voltaire built--and
builds--to God.

ROUSSEAU

Nothing is more clear than that the enjoyment of art and letters is
forbidden, in any rich or subtle degree, to the apprehension of the
moralist. It is also forbidden, for quite other reasons, to the
apprehension of the extravagantly vicious.

The moralist is debarred from any free and passionate love of
literature by the simple fact that all literature is created out of the
vices of men of letters. The extravagantly vicious man is debarred
from such a love by the still simpler fact that his own dominant
obsession narrows down his interest to the particular writers who
share his own vice.

When I encounter a catholic and impassioned lover of books--of
many books and many authors--I know two things about him--I
know that he is the opposite of a moralist, and I know that he is free
from any maniacal vice. I might go further and say that I know he
has a rooted hatred of moralists and a tolerant curiosity about every
other form of human aberration.

When I say that literature is created out of the vices of men of letters,
I use the word in a large and liberal sense. A vice is a pleasant
sensation condemned by Puritans. It is an over-emphasis laid upon
some normal reaction; or it is a perverse and morbid deviation from
the normal path.

It would not require any fantastic stretch of psychological
interpretation to show how all the great men of letters are driven
forward along their various paths by some demoniac urge, some
dynamic impulse, that has its sensual as well as its intellectual origin.
The "psychology of genius" is still in its infancy. It seems a pity that
so much of the critical interpretation of the great writers of the world
should be in the hands of persons who--by the reason of their
academic profession--are naturally more interested in the effect of
such work upon youthful minds tha