Page:Arthur Machen, The Secret Glory, 1922.djvu/248

The Secret Glory certainly. But is the joy of Adulteration to be the last goal, the final Initiation of the Race of Men? Cœlumque tueri—to sand the sugar?

"The Flagons of the Song of Songs did not contain ginger-beer.

"But the worst of it is we shall not merely descend to the beasts. We shall fall very far below the beasts. A black fellow is good, and a white fellow is good. But the white fellow who 'goes Fantee' does not become a negro—he becomes something infinitely worse, a horrible mass of the most putrid corruption.

"If we can clear our minds of the horrible cant of our 'civilisation,' if we can look at a modern 'industrial centre' with eyes purged of illusions, we shall have some notion of the awful horror to which we are descending in our effort to become as the ants and bees—creatures who know nothing of

CALIX INEBRIANS.

"I doubt if we can really make this effort. Blacks, Stinks, Desolations, Poisons, Hell's Nightmare generally have, I suspect, worked themselves into the very form and mould of our thoughts. We are sober, and perhaps the Tavern door is shut for ever against us.

"Now and then, perhaps, at rarer and still rarer intervals, a few of us will hear very faintly 232