We owe the world a living, not t'other way round. How I loathe Gounod's Ave Maria with its slimy piety, slimy echoes from the brothel. This vibrion of music, Gounod, never touched masterpieces without blighting them. Think of the Bach prelude accompanying the song. Think of mighty Faust maimed, tortured to make an operatic holiday. The Truth, so-called, is not necessarily tonic to all souls. Free-thought is never free; sometimes it is not thought; and it is usually inverted dogmatism. The woman who gives an elderly man the illusion of virility will always be sought after. Man is the only animal who can imagine what is not. We think backwards, but live forwards, said the Scandinavian mystic, Søren Kierkegaard. There are no illegitimate children; babies are always born legitimately. Ask the women. What medical pathos. Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? That's Nietzsche. He never made the blunder of lying down in the dirty straw of the sex-trough. That's why he wrote as if with a diamond on a slate of crystal. Yet he could say in the same breath that chastity is a virtue with some, with the majority almost a vice. Every man knows that a woman has a dozen different ways to make him happy, and a hundred to make him unhappy. Nous nous promenions nos préjugés! Sounds like Stendhal, doesn't it? I imitated him when I paraphrased it in English: Let us promenade our prejudices. Just as I gave Baudelaire the credit of a line he never saw, though one I believe he would have approved. Here it is: Lo! the Lesbians, their sterile sex advancing. Curious, isn't it, how Baudelaire and Swinburne loved to write about Lesbians. The influence of the Sapphic legend, I fancy, not alone because of the sweet inversion.