g, revolutionary "in the most
approved style," as a certain apologist of robbery and murder put it not
long ago as to Bolshevism, amid the "laughter and cheers" of English
aspirants thereto. It takes for scene a quite openly borrowed
representation of the famous forges of Creusot, and attacks Capital, the
_bourgeois_, and everything established, quite in the purest Bolshevist
fashion. Both books, and _Verite_, display throughout a singular
delusion, aggravating the anti-theism rather than atheism above
mentioned, my own formulation of which, in another book some decade ago,
I may as well, in a note,[477] borrow, instead of merely paraphrasing
it. The milder idiosyncrasy referred to therein will certainly not
adjust itself, whatever it might do to the not ungenial ideals of
_Fecondite_, to those of _Travail_. This ends in a sort of Paradise of
Man, where electricity takes every kind of labour (except that of
cultivating the gardens?) off men's hands, and the Coquecigrues have
come again, and the pigs run about ready roasted, and a millennium or
mill_iard_ennium of Cocaigne begins. Yet there are fine passages in
_Travail_, and the author reflects, powerfully enough, the grime and
glare and scorch of the furnaces; the thirst and lust and struggles of
their slaves; the baser side of the life of their owners and
officials--and of the wives of these. There is nothing in the book quite
equal to the Vision of the City of Lubricity in _Fecondite_, but there
are one or two things not much below it. And the whole is once more
Blake-like, with a degraded or defiled Blakishness. In fact, _Fecondite_
and _Travail_, illustrated in the spirit of the Prophetic Books, are
quite imaginable possessions; and, though a nervous person might not
like to go to sleep in the same room with them, not uncovetable
ones.[478]

The everlasting irony of things has seldom, in literature (though, as we
have seen, it reigns there if anywhere), secured for itself a more
striking opportunity of exemplification than this ending, in a
pseudo-apocalyptic paroxysm, of the _Roman Experimental_; perhaps one
may add that never has Romanticism, or indeed any school of letters,
scored such a triumphant victory over its decriers. It has been
contended here, and for many years in other places by the present
writer, that Naturalism was itself only a "lesion," a _sarcoma_, a
morbidly allotropic form of Romance. At this point the degeneration
turned into a sort of parod