Sympathy for the well-meaning but misguided singer reached its height about twenty years ago, when new discoveries about Villon threw a glamor over the poet of checkered life. [Footnote: See Edwin Markham, _Villon_; Swinburne, _Burns_, _A Ballad of Francois Villon_.] At the same time Verlaine and Baudelaire in France, [Footnote: See Richard Hovey, _Verlaine_; Swinburne, _Ave atque Vale_.] and Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson, and James Thomson, B. V., in England, appeared to prove the inseparability of genius and especial temptation. At this time Francis Thompson, in his poetry, presented one of the most moving cases for the poet of frail morals, and concluded What expiating agony May for him damned to poesy Shut in that little sentence be,-- What deep austerities of strife,-- He lived his life. He lived his life. [Footnote: _A Judgment in Heaven_.] Such sympathetic portrayal of the erring poet perhaps hurts his case more than does the bravado of the extreme decadent group. Philistines, puritans and philosophers alike are prone to turn to such expositions as the one just quoted and point out that it is in exact accord with their charge against the poet,--namely, that he is more susceptible to temptation than is ordinary humanity, and that therefore the proper course for true sympathizers would be, not to excuse his frailties, but to help him crush the germs of poetry out of his nature. "Genius is a disease of the nerves," is Lombroso's formulation of the charge. [Footnote: _The Man of Genius_.] Nordau points out that the disease is steadily increasing in these days of specialization, and that the overkeenness of the poet's senses in one particular direction throws his nature out of balance, so that he lacks the poise to withstand temptation. Fortunately, it is a comparatively small number of poets that surrenders to the enemy by conceding either the poet's deliberate indulgence in sin, or his pitiable moral frailty. If one were tempted to believe that this defensive portrayal of the sinful poet is in any sense a major conception in English poetry, the volley of repudiative verse greeting every outcropping of the degenerate's self-exposure would offer a sufficient disproof. In the romantic movement, for instance, one finds only Byron (among persons of importance) to uphold the theory of the perverted artist, whereas a chorus of contradiction greets each expression of his theories.