her there or in the south
of England, and the ugly men and women were of one kind with those whose
nobility and beauty had moved the ancient sculptors and poets to imagine
the gods and the heroes after the images of men. Then he began, he tells
us, to meditate how this great difference might be ended and a new life,
which would permit men to have beauty in common among them as the
starlings have, be built on the wrecks of the old life. In other words,
his mind was illuminated from within and lifted into prophecy in the full
right sense of the word, and he saw the natural things he was alone gifted
to see in their perfect form; and having that faith which is alone worth
having, for it includes all others, a sure knowledge established in the
constitution of his mind that perfect things are final things, he
announced that all he had seen would come to pass. I do not think he
troubled to understand books of economics, and Mr. Mackail says, I think,
that they vexed him and wearied him. He found it enough to hold up, as it
were, life as it is to-day beside his visions, and to show how faded its
colours were and how sapless it was. And if we had not enough artistic
feeling, enough feeling for the perfect that is, to admit the authority of
the vision; or enough faith to understand that all that is imperfect
passes away, he would not, as I think, have argued with us in a serious
spirit. Though I think that he never used the kinds of words I use in
writing of him, though I think he would even have disliked a word like
faith with its theological associations, I am certain that he understood
thoroughly, as all artists understand a little, that the important things,
the things we must believe in or perish, are beyond argument. We can no
more reason about them than can the pigeon, come but lately from the egg,
about the hawk whose shadow makes it cower among the grass. His vision is
true because it is poetical, because we are a little happier when we are
looking at it; and he knew as Shelley knew by an act of faith that the
economists should take their measurements not from life as it is, but from
the vision of men like him, from the vision of the world made perfect that
is buried under all minds. The early Christians were of the kin of the
Wilderness and of the Dry Tree, and they saw an unearthly Paradise, but he
was of the kin of the Well and of the Green Tree and he saw an Earthly
Paradise.

He obeyed his vision when he tried to ma