outwardly fit. A monstrous ideal devours and
dissolves itself, but even a rational one does not find an immortal
embodiment simply for being inwardly possible and free from
contradiction. It needs a material basis, a soil and situation
propitious to its growth. This basis, as it varies, makes the ideal vary
which is simply its expression; and therefore no ideal can be
ultimately fixed in ignorance of the conditions that may modify it. It
subsists, to be sure, as an eternal possibility, independently of all
further earthly revolutions. Once expressed, it has revealed the
inalienable values that attach to a certain form of being, whenever that
form is actualised. But its expression may have been only momentary, and
that eternal ideal may have no further relevance to the living world. A
criterion of taste, however, looks to a social career; it hopes to
educate and to judge. In order to be an applicable and a just law, it
must represent the interests over which it would preside.

There are many undiscovered ideals. There are many beauties which
nothing in this world can embody or suggest. There are also many once
suggested or even embodied, which find later their basis gone and
evaporate into their native heaven. The saddest tragedy in the world is
the destruction of what has within it no inward ground of dissolution,
death in youth, and the crushing out of perfection. Imagination has its
bereavements of this kind. A complete mastery of existence achieved at
one moment gives no warrant that it will be sustained or achieved again
at the next. The achievement may have been perfect; nature will not on
that account stop to admire it. She will move on, and the meaning which
was read so triumphantly in her momentary attitude will not fit her new
posture. Like Polonius's cloud, she will always suggest some new ideal,
because she has none of her own.

In lieu of an ideal, however, nature has a constitution, and this, which
is a necessary ground for ideals, is what it concerns the ideal to
reckon with. A poet, spokesman of his full soul at a given juncture,
cannot consider eventualities or think of anything but the message he is
sent to deliver, whether the world can then hear it or not. God, he may
feel sure, understands him, and in the eternal the beauty he sees and
loves immortally justifies his enthusiasm. Nevertheless, critics must
view his momentary ebullition from another side. They do not come to
justify the poet in his own