Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/78

 physical organism, sometimes with quite inæsthetic consequences. Samuel Pepys records that the ravishing music, at a performance of 'The Virgin Martyr,' 'did wrap up my soul,' in pure æsthetic delight, and 'made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife.' The following passage from Wordsworth's Excursion is pure enough art, and should therefore be 'without consequences,' as the Croceans would say, 'in the practical sphere':—

But Crabb Robinson tells us that reading this passage brought on a fit of illness in William Blake—a 'stomach complaint which nearly killed him.' Wordsworth was a contemporary of Blake's; and I myself have been similarly affected by the works of some of my own contemporaries. One of the works of art which have most excited the suppressive agents puts me to sleep; but all the others which have come to my notice affect me somewhat like a glass of warm water and mustard. These violent effects may, however, also be produced by pieces of 'fossil literature' taken out of what Mr. Untermeyer calls 'the lifeless and literary storehouse' of the past. I have seen a sufficiently unemotional man, of fifty and upwards, driven from the theatre in blinding tears by the presentation of a dramatic work nearly twenty-five hundred years old—The