dank shade of cloisters, under a chill
baptismal rain; rose without scent, and spiked all round with thorns,
thou hast taken the place for us of the glad and gracious roses, bathed
with nard and wine, of the dancing girls of Sybaris!_

'_The ancient world knew thee not, oh sterile flower! thou wast never
enwoven in its chaplets of delirious perfume. In that vigorous and
healthy society they would have spurned thee under foot disdainfully.
Purity, mysticism, melancholy--three words unknown to thee, three new
maladies brought into our life by the Christ!... For me, I look on
woman in the old world manner, like a fair slave, made only for our
pleasures. Christianity, in my eyes, has done nothing to rehabilitate
her.... To say the truth, I cannot conceive for what reason there should
be this desire in woman to be looked on as on a level with men.... I
have made some love-verses in my time, or at least something that
aspired to pass for such ... and there is not a vestige in them of the
modern feeling of love.... There is nothing there, as in all the
love-poetry since the Christian era, of a soul which, because it loves,
begs another soul to love it back again; nothing there of a blue and
shining lake, which begs a stream to pour itself into its bosom, that
both together they may mirror the stars of heaven; nothing there of a
pair of ring-doves, opening their wings together, that they may both
together fly to the same nest._'[16]

Such is the account the hero gives of the nature of his love for woman.
Nor does he give this account regretfully, or think that it shows him to
be in any diseased condition. It shows rather a return, on his part, to
a health that others have lost. As he looks round upon the modern world
and the purity that George Eliot says in her verses she would die for,
'_Woman_,' he exclaims mournfully, '_is become the symbol of moral and
physical beauty. The real fall of man was on the birthday of the babe
of Bethlehem_.'[17] It will be instructive to notice further that these
views are carried out by him to their full legitimate consequences, even
though this, to some degree, is against his will. '_Sometimes_,' he
says, '_I try to persuade myself that such passions are abominable, and
I say as much to myself in as severe a way as I can. But the words come
only from my lips. They are arguments that I make. They are not
arguments that I feel. The thing in question really seems quite natural
to me, and anyone