efore its corporeal eye, and merely
because it passes: to set as it were upon an equality the beetle and the
whale though Ben Jonson could find no justification for the entomologist
in _The New Inn_, but that he had been crossed in love. Literature now
demands the same right of exploration of all that passes before the mind's
eyes, and merely because it passes." Not a complete defence, for it
substitutes a spiritual for a physical objective, but sufficient it may be
for the moment, and to settle our place in the historical process.

The critic might well reply that certain of my generation delighted in
writing with an unscientific partiality for subjects long forbidden. Yet
is it not most important to explore especially what has been long
forbidden, and to do this not only "with the highest moral purpose," like
the followers of Ibsen, but gaily, out of sheer mischief, or sheer delight
in that play of the mind. Donne could be as metaphysical as he pleased,
and yet never seemed unhuman and hysterical as Shelley often does, because
he could be as physical as he pleased; and besides who will thirst for the
metaphysical, who have a parched tongue, if we cannot recover the Vision
of Evil?

I have felt in certain early works of my own which I have long abandoned,
and here and there in the work of others of my generation, a slight,
sentimental sensuality which is disagreeable, and doesn't exist in the
work of Donne, let us say, because he, being permitted to say what he
pleased, was never tempted to linger, or rather to pretend that we can
linger, between spirit and sense. How often had I heard men of my time
talk of the meeting of spirit and sense, yet there is no meeting but only
change upon the instant, and it is by the perception of a change like the
sudden "blacking out" of the lights of the stage, that passion creates its
most violent sensation.

XIV

Dowson was now at Dieppe, now at a Normandy village. Wilde, too, was at
Dieppe; and Symons, Beardsley, and others would cross and recross,
returning with many tales, and there were letters and telegrams. Dowson
wrote a protest against some friend's too vivid essay upon the disorder of
his life, and explained that in reality he was living a life of industry
in a little country village; but before the letter arrived that friend
received a wire, "arrested, sell watch and send proceeds." Dowson's watch
had been left in London--and then another wire, "Am free." Dowson, ran t