araoh's lash
or Egypt's sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids
to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment. Is there one amongst
us who would exchange them for the lives of the ignominious slaves that
died? What care I that the virtue of some sixteen-year-old maiden was the
price paid for Ingres' _La Source_? That the model died of drink and
disease in the hospital, is nothing when compared with the essential that I
should have _La Source_, that exquisite dream of innocence, to think
of till my soul is sick with delight of the painter's holy vision. Nay
more, the knowledge that a wrong was done--that millions of Israelites died
in torments, that a girl, or a thousand girls, died in the hospital for
that one virginal thing, is an added pleasure which I could not afford to
spare. Oh, for the silence of marble courts, for the shadow of great
pillars, for gold, for reticulated canopies of lilies; to see the great
gladiators pass, to hear them cry the famous "Ave Caesar," to hold the
thumb down, to see the blood flow, to fill the languid hours with the
agonies of poisoned slaves! Oh, for excess, for crime! I would give many
lives to save one sonnet by Baudelaire; for the hymn, "_A la tres-chere,
a la tres-belle, qui remplit mon coeur de clarte_," let the first-born
in every house in Europe be slain; and in all sincerity I profess my
readiness to decapitate all the Japanese in Japan and elsewhere, to save
from destruction one drawing by Hokee. Again I say that all we deem sublime
in the world's history are acts, of injustice; and it is certain that if
mankind does not relinquish at once, and for ever, its vain, mad, and fatal
dream of justice, the world will lapse into barbarism. England was great
and glorious, because England was unjust, and England's greatest son was
the personification of injustice--Cromwell.

But the old world of heroes is over now. The skies above us are dark with
sentimentalism, the sand beneath us is shoaling fast, we are running with
streaming canvas upon ruin; all ideals have gone; nothing remains to us for
worship but the Mass, the blind, inchoate, insatiate Mass; fog and fen land
before us, we shall founder in putrefying mud, creatures of the ooze and
rushes about us--we, the great ship that has floated up from the antique
world. Oh, for the antique world, its plain passion, its plain joys in the
sea, where the Triton blew a plaintive blast, and the forest where the