nd having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it
passes to the strange and hidden, and at last must find its delight,
having outrun its harmonies in the emphatic and discordant. When I was a
boy at the art school I watched an older student late returned from
Paris, with a wonder that had no understanding in it. He was very
amorous, and every new love was the occasion of a new picture, and every
new picture was uglier than its forerunner. He was excited about his
mistress's eyebrows, as was fitting, but the interest of beauty had been
exhausted by the logical energies of Art, which destroys where it has
rummaged, and can but discover, whether it will or no. We cannot
discover our subject-matter by deliberate intellect, for when a
subject-matter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere, and when it moves
us, even though it be 'that old ballad material of Shakespeare' or even
'the morbid terror of death,' we can laugh at reason. We must not ask is
the world interested in this or that, for nothing is in question but our
own interest, and we can understand no other. Our place in the Hierarchy
is settled for us by our choice of a subject-matter, and all good
criticism is hieratic, delighting in setting things above one another,
Epic and Drama above Lyric and so on, and not merely side by side. But
it is our instinct and not our intellect that chooses. We can
deliberately refashion our characters, but not our painting or our
poetry. If our characters also were not unconsciously refashioned so
completely by the unfolding of the logical energies of Art, that even
simple things have in the end a new aspect in our eyes, the Arts would
not be among those things that return for ever. The ballads that Bishop
Percy gathered returned in the Ancient Mariner, and the delight in the
world of old Greek sculptors sprang into a more delicate loveliness in
that archaistic head of the young athlete down the long corridor to your
left hand as you go into the British Museum. Civilisation too, will not
that also destroy where it has loved, until it shall bring the simple
and natural things again and a new Argo with all the gilding on her bows
sail out to find another fleece?

THE TRESSES OF THE HAIR

Hafiz cried to his beloved, 'I made a bargain with that brown hair
before the beginning of time, and it shall not be broken through
unending time,' and it may be that Mistress Nature knows that we have
lived many times, and that whatsoever ch