The persons who maintained just now (and who does not feel a
hard-hearted Philistine for gainsaying them?) that we have no right to
ostracise, still less to stone, unwholesome kinds of art, make much of
the fact that, as we are told in church, "We have no health in us."
But it is the recognition of this lack of health which hardens my
heart to unwholesome persons and things. If we must be wary of what
moods and preferences we foster in ourselves, it is because so few of
us are congenitally sound--perhaps none without some organic weakness;
and because, even letting soundness alone, very few of us lead lives
that are not, in one respect or another, strained or starved or
cramped. Gods and archangels might certainly indulge exclusively in
the literature and art for which Baudelaire may stand in this
discussion. But gods and archangels require neither filters nor
disinfectants, and may slake their thirst in the veriest decoction of
typhoid.