sexual instinct. "Wilde will never lift his head
again," said the art critic, Gleeson White, "for he has against him all
men of infamous life." When the verdict was announced the harlots in the
street outside danced upon the pavement.

III

Somewhere about 1450, though later in some parts of Europe by a hundred
years or so, and in some earlier, men attained to personality in great
numbers, "Unity of Being," and became like a "perfectly proportioned human
body," and as men so fashioned held places of power, their nations had it
too, prince and ploughman sharing that thought and feeling. What
afterwards showed for rifts and cracks were there already, but imperious
impulse held all together. Then the scattering came, the seeding of the
poppy, bursting of pea-pod, and for a time personality seemed but the
stronger for it. Shakespeare's people make all things serve their passion,
and that passion is for the moment the whole energy of their being--birds,
beasts, men, women, landscape, society, are but symbols and metaphors,
nothing is studied in itself, the mind is a dark well, no surface, depth
only. The men that Titian painted, the men that Jongsen painted, even the
men of Van Dyck, seemed at moments like great hawks at rest. In the Dublin
National Gallery there hung, perhaps there still hangs, upon the same
wall, a portrait of some Venetian gentleman by Strozzi, and Mr. Sargent's
painting of President Wilson. Whatever thought broods in the dark eyes of
that Venetian gentleman, has drawn its life from his whole body; it feeds
upon it as the flame feeds upon the candle--and should that thought be
changed, his pose would change, his very cloak would rustle for his whole
body thinks. President Wilson lives only in the eyes, which are steady and
intent; the flesh about the mouth is dead, and the hands are dead, and the
clothes suggest no movement of his body, nor any movement but that of the
valet, who has brushed and folded in mechanical routine. There, all was an
energy flowing outward from the nature itself; here, all is the anxious
study and slight deflection of external force; there man's mind and body
were predominantly subjective; here all is objective, using those words
not as philosophy uses them, but as we use them in conversation.

The bright part of the moon's disk, to adopt the symbolism of a certain
poem, is subjective mind, and the dark, objective mind, and we have eight
and twenty Phases for our classificati