treet before the house
of the victor; nor do the great ladies of London finish their balls on the
pavement before their doors as did the great Venetian ladies, even in the
eighteenth century, conscious of an all enfolding sympathy. Doubtless
because fragments broke into ever smaller fragments we saw one another in
a light of bitter comedy, and in the arts, where now one technical element
reigned and now another, generation hated generation, and accomplished
beauty was snatched away when it had most engaged our affections. One
thing I did not foresee, not having the courage of my own thought: the
growing murderousness of the world.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

XXIII

If abstraction had reached, or all but reached its climax, escape might be
possible for many, and if it had not, individual men might still escape.
If Chaucer's personages had disengaged themselves from Chaucer's crowd,
forgot their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications
became each in turn the centre of some Elizabethan play, and had after
split into their elements and so given birth to romantic poetry, must I
reverse the cinematograph? I thought that the general movement of
literature must be such a reversal, men being there displayed in casual,
temporary, contact as at the Tabard door. I had lately read Tolstoy's
_Anna Karenina_ and thought that where his theoretical capacity had not
awakened there was such a turning back: but a nation or an individual with
great emotional intensity might follow the pilgrims as it were to some
unknown shrine, and give to all those separated elements and to all that
abstract love and melancholy, a symbolical, a mythological coherence. Not
Chaucer's rough tongued riders, but rather an ended pilgrimage, a
procession of the Gods! Arthur Symons brought back from Paris stories of
Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, and so brought me confirmation, as I thought,
and I began to announce a poetry like that of the Sufi's. I could not
endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where
it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some
new _Prometheus Unbound_; Patri