on of mankind, and of the movement
of his thought. At the first Phase--the night where there is no
moonlight--all is objective, while when, upon the fifteenth night, the
moon comes to the full, there is only subjective mind. The mid-renaissance
could but approximate to the full moon "For there is no human life at the
full or the dark," but we may attribute to the next three nights of the
moon the men of Shakespeare, of Titian, of Strozzi, and of Van Dyck, and
watch them grow more reasonable, more orderly, less turbulent, as the
nights pass; and it is well to find before the fourth--the nineteenth moon
counting from the start--a sudden change, as when a cloud becomes rain, or
water freezes, for the great transitions are sudden; popular, typical men
have grown more ugly and more argumentative; the face that Van Dyck called
a fatal face has faded before Cromwell's warty opinionated head.
Henceforth no mind made like "a perfectly proportioned human body" shall
sway the public, for great men must live in a portion of themselves,
become professional and abstract; but seeing that the moon's third quarter
is scarce passed, that abstraction has attained but not passed its climax,
that a half, as I affirm it, of the twenty-second night still lingers,
they may subdue and conquer; cherish, even, some Utopian dream; spread
abstraction ever further till thought is but a film, and there is no dark
depth any more, surface only. But men who belong by nature to the nights
near to the full are still born, a tragic minority, and how shall they do
their work when too ambitious for a private station, except as Wilde of
the nineteenth Phase, as my symbolism has it, did his work. He understood
his weakness, true personality was impossible, for that is born in
solitude, and at his moon one is not solitary; he must project himself
before the eyes of others, and, having great ambition, before some great
crowd of eyes; but there is no longer any great crowd that cares for his
true thought. He must humour and cajole and pose, take worn-out stage
situations, for he knows that he may be as romantic as he please, so long
as he does not believe in his romance, and all that he may get their ears
for a few strokes of contemptuous wit in which he does believe.

We Rhymers did not humour and cajole; but it was not wholly from demerit,
it was in part because of different merit, that he refused our exile.
Shaw, as I understand him, has no true quarrel with his