And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetry consider this matter.  These are the love-poets who have no reluctance in adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not even been introduced.  Their verse is full of ready-made memories, various, numerous, and cruel.  No single life—­supposing it to be a liberal life concerned with something besides sex—­could quite suffice for so much experience, so much disillusion, so much deception.  To achieve that tone in its fullness it is necessary to take for one’s own the praeterita (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him—­not to live but—­to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than any man lives, and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances with all kinds of poets.

As the Franciscans wear each other’s old habits, and one friar goes about darned because of another’s rending, so the poet of a certain order grows cynical for the sake of many poets’ old loves.  Not otherwise will the resultant verse succeed in implying so much—­or rather so many, in the feminine plural.  The man of very sensitive individuality might hesitate at the adoption.  The Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousness and to overcome it.  And yet, if choice were, one might wish rather to make use of one’s fellow men’s old shoes than put their old secrets to use, and dress one’s art in a motley of past passions.  Moreover, to utilize the mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verse and phrase.  For the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry are familiar enough.  One of them is the absence of the word of promise and pledge, the loss of the earliest and simplest of the impulses of love:  which is the vow.  “Till death!” “For ever!” are cries too simple and too natural to be commonplace, and in their denial there is the least tolerable of banalities—­that of other men’s disillusions.

Perfect personal distinctness of Experience would be in literature a delicate Innocence.  Not a passage of cheapness, of greed, of assumption, of sloth, or of any such sins in the work of him whose love-poetry were thus true, and whose pudeur of personality thus simple and inviolate.  This is the private man, in other words the gentleman, who will neither love nor remember in common.

THE HOURS OF SLEEP

There are hours claimed by Sleep, but refused to him.  None the less are they his by some state within the mind, which answers rhythmically and punctually to that claim.  Awake and at work, without drowsiness, without languor, and without gloom, the night mind of man is yet not his day mind; he has night-powers of feeling which are at their highest in dreams, but are night’s as well as sleep’s.  The powers of the mind in dreams, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because the mind is awake; it is the hour of their return as it is the hour of a tide’s, and they do return.