Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/119

Rh to visible beauty, may not only be equivalent to moral discrimination and a safeguard of virtue, but also a mode of solving the ultimate religious questions of deity and man's relation to it. Marius does arrive at an intimation, perhaps a faith, that a protective divine companionship goes beside him, and at an emotion of gratitude to that unseen presence.

Two points only, in this wide branch of the speculation, can be dwelt on now. He says toward the end that he thinks he has failed in love; and here he touches on one weakness of his ideal, for it is only by love, as he perceives, that any reconciliation between the lover of beauty and the multitudinous pitiful pain which is so large a part of the objective universe can be obtained. The second weakness is perhaps greater. In his ideal there is both doubt and isolation; the subjective element in his knowledge, the exclusive reliance on his own impressions, the fact that in metaphysical belief the world is only his world, and in actual living the experience is individual,—all this holds in it a basis of ultimate incertitude. True and real for him it no doubt is, but is that, indeed, the necessary limit of knowledge and