lloquialism; but it is such colloquialism as
ghosts or vampires would use.

Poe remains--that has been already said, has it not?--absolutely cold
while he produces his effects. There is a frozen contempt indicated
in every line he writes for the poor facile artists "who speak with
tears." Yet the moods through which his Annabels and Ligeias and
Ulalumes lead us are moods he must surely himself have known.
Yes, he knew them; but they were, so to speak, so completely the
atmosphere he lived in that there was no need for him to be carried
out of himself when he wrote of them; no need for anything but icy,
pitiless transcription. Has it been noticed how inhumanly immoral
this great poet is? Not because he drank wine or took drugs. All that
has been exaggerated, and, anyway, what does it matter now? But in
a much deeper and more deadly sense. It is strange! The world
makes such odd blunders. It seems possessed of the idea that absurd
amorous scamps like Casanova reach the bottom of wickedness.
They do not even approach it. Intrinsically they are quite stupidly
"good." Then, again, Byron is supposed to have been a wicked man.
He himself aspired to be nothing less. But he was everything less.
He was a great, greedy, selfish, swaggering, magnanimous infant!
Oscar Wilde is generally regarded as something short of "the just
man made perfect," but his simple, babyish passion for touching
pretty things, toying with pretty people, wearing pretty clothes, and
drinking absinthe, is far too naive a thing to be, at bottom, _evil._
No really wicked person could have written "The Importance of
Being Earnest," with those delicious, paradoxical children rallying
one another, and "Aunt Augusta" calling aloud for cucumber-sandwiches!
Salome itself--that Scarlet Litany--which brings to us, as
in a box of alabaster, all the perfumes and odours of amorous lust,
is not really a "wicked" play; not wicked, that is to say, unless all
mad passion is wicked. Certainly the lust in "Salome" smoulders and
glows with a sort of under-furnace of concentration, but, after all, it
is the old, universal obsession. Why is it more wicked to say, "Suffer
me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan!" than to say, "Her lips suck forth
my soul--see where it flies!"? Why is it more wicked to say, "Thine
eyes are like black holes, burnt by torches in Tyrian tapestry!" than
to cry out, as Antony cries out, for the hot kisses of Egypt?
Obviously the madness of physical desire is a