time, its moon and
his almost exactly coincide. He is quite content to exchange Narcissus and
his Pool for the signal box at a railway junction, where goods and
travellers pass perpetually upon their logical glittering road. Wilde was
a monarchist, though content that monarchy should turn demagogue for its
own safety, and he held a theatre by the means whereby he held a London
dinner table. "He who can dominate a London dinner table," he had boasted,
"can dominate the world." While Shaw has but carried his street-corner
socialist eloquence on to the stage, and in him one discovers, in his
writing and his public speech, as once--before their outline had been
softened by prosperity or the passage of the years--in his clothes and in
his stiff joints, the civilization that Sargent's picture has explored.
Neither his crowd nor he have yet made that discovery that brought
President Wilson so near his death, that the moon draws to its fourth
quarter. But what happens to the individual man whose moon has come to
that fourth quarter, and what to the civilization...?

I can but remember pipe music to-night, though I can half hear beyond it
in the memory a weightier music, but this much at any rate is certain--the
dream of my early manhood, that a modern nation can return to Unity of
Culture, is false; though it may be we can achieve it for some small
circle of men and women, and there leave it till the moon bring round its
century.

"The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon
The creeping cat looked up.

* * * *

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place;
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that her pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
Her changing eyes."

IV

Henley's troubles and infirmities were growing upon him. He, too, an
ambitious, formidable man, who showed alike in his practice and in his
theory, in his lack of sympathy for Rossetti and Landor, for instance,
that he never understood how small a fragment of our own nature can be
brought to perfect expression, nor that even but with great toil, in a
much divided civilization; though, doubtless, if our own Phase be right, a
fragme