patterns into which they fall when I am the looker-on. A French miracle-working priest once said to Maud Gonne and myself and to an English Catholic who had come with us, that a certain holy woman had been the "victim" for his village, and that another holy woman who had been victim for all France had given him her Crucifix, because he too was doomed to become a "victim."
French psychical research has offered evidence to support the historical proofs that such saints as Lydwine of Schiedam whose life suggested to Paul Claudel his Annonce faite à Marie did really cure disease by taking it upon themselves. As disease was considered the consequence of sin, to take it upon themselves was to copy Christ. All my proof that mind flows into mind, and that we cannot separate mind and body, drives me to accept the thought of victimage in many complex forms, and I ask myself if I cannot so explain the strange, precocious genius of Beardsley. He was in my lunar metaphor a man of the thirteenth phase, his nature on the edge of Unity of Being, the intellectual understanding of that Unity his one overmastering purpose; whereas Lydwine de Schiedam and her like, being of the saints, are at the seven and twentieth phase, and seek a unity with a life beyond the individual life; and so being all subjective he would take upon himself not the consequences, but the knowledge of sin. I surrender myself to the wild thought that by so doing he enabled men and women who had never heard his name, to recover innocence. I have so often too practised meditations, or experienced dreams, where the meditations or dreams of two or three persons contrast and complement one another, and just in so far as those persons are complementary or contrasting, that I am convinced that it is precisely from the Saint or potential saint that he would gather knowledge. I see in his fat women and shadowy pathetic girls, his horrible children half child half embryo, in all the lascivious monstrous imagery of the privately published designs, the phantasms that from the beginning have defied the scourge, and the hair shirt. I once said to him half seriously "Beardsley, I was defending you last night in the only way in which it is possible to defend you, by saying that all you draw is inspired by rage against iniquity" and he answered "If it were so inspired the work would be in no way different," 0meaning, as I think, by that profound sentence, that he drew with such sincerity that no change of motive could change the image. I know that some turn of disease
