gaze not at a work of art, but at the
re-creation of the man through that art, the birth of a new species of
man, and, it may even seem that the hairs of our heads stand up, because
that birth, that re-creation, is from terror. Had not Dante and Villon
understood that their fate wrecked what life could not rebuild, had they
lacked their Vision of Evil, had they cherished any species of optimism,
they could but have found a false beauty, or some momentary instinctive
beauty, and suffered no change at all, or but changed as do the wild
creatures, or from devil well to devil sick, and so round the clock.

They and their sort alone earn contemplation, for it is only when the
intellect has wrought the whole of life to drama, to crisis, that we may
live for contemplation, and yet keep our intensity.

And these things are true also of nations, but the Gate-keepers who drive
the nation to war or anarchy that it may find its Image are different from
those who drive individual men, though I think at times they work
together. And as I look backward upon my own writing, I take pleasure
alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard,
cold, some articulation of the Image, which is the opposite of all that I
am in my daily life, and all that my country is; yet man or nation can no
more make Mask or Image than the seed can be made by the soil into which
it is cast.

Ille.

"What portion in the world can the artist have,
Who has awakened from the common dream,
But dissipation and despair?

Hic.

And yet
No one denies to Keats, love of the world.
Remember his deliberate happiness.

Ille.

His art is happy, but who knows his mind?
I see a schoolboy, when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.
For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And made, being poor, ailing, and ignorant....
Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
Luxuriant song."

BOOK IV

THE TRAGIC GENERATION

_THE TRAGIC GENERATION_

I

Two or three years after our return to Bedford Park _The Doll's House_ had
been played at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, the first Ibsen play to
be played in England, and somebody had given me a seat for the gallery. In
the middle of the first act, while the heroine was asking for macaroons, a
middle-aged washerwoman who sat in fron