not been hitherto in European literature--and would not be again, for
even the historical process has its ebb and flow, till Keats wrote his
_Endymion_. I think that the movement of our thought has more and more so
separated certain images and regions of the mind, and that these images
grow in beauty as they grow in sterility. Shakespeare leaned, as it were,
even as craftsman, upon the general fate of men and nations, had about him
the excitement of the playhouse; and all poets, including Spencer in all
but a few pages, until our age came, and when it came almost all, have had
some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give companionship with their
fellows. Had not Matthew Arnold his faith in what he described as the
best thought of his generation? Browning his psychological curiosity,
Tennyson, as before him Shelley and Wordsworth, moral values that were not
aesthetic values? But Coleridge of the _Ancient Mariner_, and _Kubla
Khan_, and Rossetti in all his writings made what Arnold has called that
"morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling, and
to unite this to perfection of form," sought this new, pure beauty, and
suffered in their lives because of it. The typical men of the classical
age (I think of Commodus, with his half-animal beauty, his cruelty, and
his caprice), lived public lives, pursuing curiosities of appetite, and so
found in Christianity, with its Thebaid and its Mariotic Sea the needed
curb. But what can the Christian confessor say to those who more and more
must make all out of the privacy of their thought, calling up perpetual
images of desire, for he cannot say "Cease to be artist, cease to be
poet," where the whole life is art and poetry, nor can he bid men leave
the world, who suffer from the terrors that pass before shut-eyes.
Coleridge, and Rossetti though his dull brother did once persuade him that
he was an agnostic, were devout Christians, and Steinbock and Beardsley
were so towards their lives' end, and Dowson and Johnson always, and yet I
think it but deepened despair and multiplied temptation.

"Dark Angel, with thine aching lust,
To rid the world of penitence:
Malicious angel, who still dost
My soul such subtil violence!

When music sounds, then changest thou
A silvery to a sultry fire:
Nor will thine envious heart allow
Delight untortured by desire.

Through thee, the gracious Muses turn
To Furies, O mine Enemy!
And all the things of beau