Oh, for excess, for crime!  I would give many lives to save one sonnet by Baudelaire; for the hymn, “A la tres-chere, a la tres-belle, qui remplit mon coeur de clarte,” let the first-born in every house in Europe be slain; and in all sincerity I profess my readiness to decapitate all the Japanese in Japan and elsewhere, to save from destruction one drawing by Hokee.  Again I say that all we deem sublime in the world’s history are acts, of injustice; and it is certain that if mankind does not relinquish at once, and for ever, its vain, mad, and fatal dream of justice, the world will lapse into barbarism.  England was great and glorious, because England was unjust, and England’s greatest son was the personification of injustice—­Cromwell.

But the old world of heroes is over now.  The skies above us are dark with sentimentalism, the sand beneath us is shoaling fast, we are running with streaming canvas upon ruin; all ideals have gone; nothing remains to us for worship but the Mass, the blind, inchoate, insatiate Mass; fog and fen land before us, we shall founder in putrefying mud, creatures of the ooze and rushes about us—­we, the great ship that has floated up from the antique world.  Oh, for the antique world, its plain passion, its plain joys in the sea, where the Triton blew a plaintive blast, and the forest where the whiteness of the nymph was seen escaping!  We are weary of pity, we are weary of being good; we are weary of tears and effusion, and our refuge—­the British Museum—­is the wide sea shore and the wind of the ocean.  There, there is real joy in the flesh; our statues are naked, but we are ashamed, and our nakedness is indecency:  a fair, frank soul is mirrored in those fauns and nymphs; and how strangely enigmatic is the soul of the antique world, the bare, barbarous soul of beauty and of might!

CHAPTER IX

But neither Apollo nor Buddha could help or save me.  One in his exquisite balance of body, a skylark-like song of eternal beauty, stood lightly advancing; the other sat sombrously contemplating, calm as a beautiful evening.  I looked for sorrow in the eyes of the pastel—­the beautiful pastel that seemed to fill with a real presence the rich autumnal leaves where the jays darted and screamed.  The twisted columns of the bed rose, burdened with great weight of fringes and curtains, the python devoured a guinea pig, the last I gave him; the great white cat came to me.  I said all this must go, must henceforth be to me an abandoned dream, a something, not more real than a summer meditation.  So be it, and, as was characteristic of me, I broke with Paris suddenly, without warning anyone.  I knew in my heart of hearts that I should never return, but no word was spoken, and I continued a pleasant delusion with myself; I told my concierge that I would return in a month, and I left all to be sold, brutally sold by auction, as the letter I read in the last chapter charmingly and touchingly describes.