Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/90

56 unities of God; the man of science, the moralist, the humanitarian, the politician, St Simeon Stylites upon his pillar, St Antony in his cavern; all whose pre-occupation is to know themselves for fragments, and at last for nothing; to hollow their hearts out till they are void and without form, to summon a creator by revealing chaos, to become the lamp for another's wick and oil; and indeed it may be that it has been for their guidance in a very special sense that the "perfectly proportioned human body" suffered crucifixion. For them mask and image are of necessity morbid, turning their eyes upon themselves, as though they were of those who can be law unto themselves; of whom Chapman has written, "Neither is it lawful that they should stoop to any other law," whereas they are indeed of those who can but ask "Have I behaved as well as So-and-So?" "Am I a good man according to the commandments?" or, "Do I realize my own nothingness before God?" "Have my experiments and observations excluded the personal factor with sufficient rigour?" Such men do not assume wisdom or beauty as Shelley did, when he masked himself as Ahasuerus or as Prince Athanasius, nor do they pursue an image through a world that had else seemed an uninhabitable wilderness till, amid the privations of that pursuit, the image is no more named Pandemos, but Urania; for such men must cast all masks away and fly the image, till that image, transfigured because of their cruelties of self-abasement, becomes itself some image or epitome of the whole natural or supernatural world, and itself pursues. The wholeness of the supernatural world can only express itself in personal form, because it has no epitome but man, nor can the "Hound of Heaven" fling itself into any but an empty heart. We may know the fugitives from other poets because, like George Herbert, like Francis Thompson, like George Russell, their imaginations grow more vivid in the expression of something which they have not themselves created, some historical religion or cause. But if the fugitive should live, as I think Russell does at times, as 1t i1s natural for a Morris or a Henley or a Shelley to live, hunters and pursuers all, his art surrenders itself to moral or poetical commonplace, to a repetition of thoughts and images that have no relation to experience.

I think that Russell would not have disappointed even my hopes had he, instead of meeting as an impressionable youth with our modern subjective romanticism, met with some form of traditional belief, which condemned all that romanticism admires and praises,