Acrasia he aroused the indignation of Lord Burleigh, "that rugged forehead" and Lord Burleigh was in the right if morality were our only object.
In those islands certain qualities of beauty, certain forms of sensuous loveliness were separated from all the general purposes of life as they had not been hitherto in European literature—and would not be again, for even the historical process has its ebb and flow, till Keats wrote his Endymion. I think that the movement of our thought has more and more so separated certain images and regions of the mind, and that these images grow in beauty as they grow in sterility. Shakespeare leaned as it were, even as craftsman, upon the general fate of men and nations, had about him the excitement of the playhouse, and all poets, including Spenser in all but a few pages, until our age came round, and when it came almost all had some propaganda or traditional doctrine to give them companionship with their fellows. Had not Matthew Arnold his faith, in what he described as the best thought of his generation? Browning his psychological curiosity, Tennyson, as before him Shelley and Wordsworth, moral values that were not aesthetic values? But Coleridge of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, and Rossetti in all his writings, made what Arnold has called that "morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling, and to unite this to perfection of form," sought this new, pure beauty, and suffered in their lives because of it. The typical men of the classical age (I think of Commodus, with his half-animal beauty, his cruelty and his caprice) lived public lives, pursuing curiosities of appetite, and so found in Christianity, with its Thebiad and its Mareotic Sea the needed curb. But what can the Christian confessor say to those who more and more must make all out of the privacy of their thought, calling up perpetual images of desire, for he cannot say "cease to be artist, cease to be poet," where the whole life is art and poetry, nor can he bid men leave the world, who suffer from the terrors that pass before shut-eyes. Coleridge and Rossetti though his dull brother did once persuade him that he was an agnostic, were devout Christians, and Steinbock and Beardsley were so towards their lives' end, and Dowson and Johnson always, and yet I think it but deepened despair and multiplied temptation.
"Dark Angel, with thine aching lust,
To rid the world of penitence:
