I
remember that I was ironic and indignant when he left the Art Schools
because his "will was weak, and must grow weaker if he followed any
emotional pursuit;" as, later, when he let the readers of a magazine
decide between his prose and his verse. I now know that there are men who
cannot possess "Unity of Being," who must not seek it or express it--and
who, so far from seeking an anti-self, a Mask that delineates a being in
all things the opposite to their natural state, can but seek the
suppression of the anti-self, till the natural state alone remains. These
are those who must seek no image of desire, but await that which lies
beyond their mind, unities not of the mind, but unities of nature, unities
of God: the man of science, the moralist, the humanitarian, the
politician, St. Simon Stylites upon his pillar, St. Antony in his cavern;
all whose pre-occupation is to know themselves for fragments, and at last
for nothing; to hollow their hearts out till they are void and without
form, to summon a creator by revealing chaos, to become the lamp for
another's wick and oil; and indeed it may be that it has been for their
guidance in a very special sense that the "perfectly proportioned human
body" suffered crucifixion. For them Mask and Image are of necessity
morbid, turning their eyes upon themselves, as though they were of those
who can be law unto themselves, of whom Chapman has written, "Neither is
it lawful that they should stoop to any other law," whereas they are
indeed of those who can but ask, "Have I behaved as well as So-and-so?"
"Am I a good man according to the commandments?" or, "Do I realise my own
nothingness before God?" "Have my experiments and observations excluded
the personal factor with sufficient rigour?" Such men do not assume wisdom
or beauty as Shelley did, when he masked himself as Ahasuerus, or as
Prince Athanais, nor do they pursue an Image through a world that had else
seemed an uninhabitable wilderness till, amid the privations of that
pursuit, the Image is no more named Pandemos, but Urania; for such men
must cast all Masks away and fly the Image, till that Image, transfigured
because of their cruelties of self-abasement, becomes itself some Image or
epitome of the whole natural or supernatural world, and itself pursues.
The wholeness of the supernatural world can only express itself in
personal form, because it has no epitome but man, nor can _The Hound of
Heaven_ fling itself into any but