t to call him to account for his faults. Though Swinburne
muses happily over the sins of Villon,

But from thy feet now death hath washed the mire,
[Footnote: _A Ballad of Francois Villon._]
it is difficult to see how he could seriously have advanced such a
claim, inasmuch as, assuming Villon's sincerity, the reader, without
recourse to a biography, may reconstruct the whole course of his moral
history from his writings.

Unquestionably if the poet wishes to satisfy his enemies as to the
ethical worth of his poetry, he is under obligation to prove to them
that as "the man of feeling" he possesses only those impulses that lead
him toward righteousness. And though puritans, philosophers and
philistines quarrel over technical points in their conceptions of
virtue, still, if the poet is not a criminal, he should be able, by
making a plain statement of his innocence, to remove the most heinous
charges against him, which bind his enemies into a coalition.

There is no doubt that poets, as a class, have acknowledged the
obligation of proving that their lives are pure. But the effectiveness
of their statements has been largely dissipated by the fact that their
voices have been almost drowned by the clamor of a small coterie which
finds its chief delight in brazenly exaggerating the vices popularly
ascribed to it, then defending them as the poet's exclusive privilege.

So perennially does this group flourish, and so shrill-voiced are its
members in self-advertisement, that it is useless for other poets to
present their case, till the claims of the ostentatiously wicked are
heard. One is inclined, perhaps, to dismiss them as pseudo-poets, whose
only chance at notoriety is through enunciating paradoxes. In these days
when the school has shrunk to Ezra Pound and his followers, vaunting
their superiority to the public, "whose virgin stupidity is
untemptable," [Footnote: Ezra Pound, _Tensone._] it is easy to
dismiss the men and their verse thus lightly. But what is one to say
when one encounters the decadent school in the last century, flourishing
at a time when, in the words of George Augustus Scala, the public had to
choose between "the clever (but I cannot say moral) Mr. Swinburne, and
the moral (but I cannot say clever) Mr. Tupper?" [Footnote: See E.
Gosse, _Life of Swinburne,_ p. 162.] What is one to say of a period
wherein the figure of Byron, with his bravado and contempt for accepted
morality, towers above most of his c