physical degeneration or abnormality
of the artist. Some of the finest work in art and literature, indeed,
has been produced by men who could not, from any standpoint, be
pronounced normal. In the case of Flaubert, of De Maupassant, of
Dostoievsky, of Poe, and a score of others, though the organic system
was more or less flawed, the work remains touched with that universal
quality that gives artistic permanence even to perceptions born of the
abnormal." Mr. Newman might have added other names to his list, those
of Michael Angelo and Beethoven and Swinburne. Really, is any great
genius quite sane according to philistine standards? The answer must be
negative. The old enemy has merely changed his mode of attack: instead
of charging genius with madness, the abnormal used in an abnormal sense
is lugged in and though these imputations of degeneracy, moral and
physical, have in some cases proven true, the genius of the accused one
can in no wise be denied. But then as Mr. Philip Hale asks: Why this
timidity at being called decadent? What's in the name?

Havelock Ellis in his masterly study of Joris Karl Huysmans, considers
the much misunderstood phenomenon in art called decadence. "Technically
a decadent style is only such in relation to a classic style. It is
simply a further development of a classic style, a further
specialization, the homogeneous in Spencerian phraseology having become
heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are
subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole is
subordinated to the parts." Then he proceeds to show in literature that
Sir Thomas Browne, Emerson, Pater, Carlyle, Poe, Hawthorne and Whitman
are decadents--not in any invidious sense--but simply in "the breaking
up of the whole for the benefit of its parts." Nietzsche is quoted to
the effect that "in the period of corruption in the evolution of
societies we are apt to overlook the fact that the energy which in more
primitive times marked the operations of a community as a whole has now
simply been transferred to the individuals themselves, and this
aggrandizement of the individual really produces an even greater amount
of energy." And further, Ellis: "All art is the rising and falling of
the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent
extremes. Decadence suggests to us going down, falling, decay. If we
walk down a real hill we do not feel that we commit a more wicked act
than when we wal