into which
this voluptuous religion of pity can lead us. O that figure in the
white nightgown, blessing his reformed harlot!

It is a pity Wagner ever touched the Celtic Legend--German
sentimentality and Celtic romance need a Heine to deal with them!

It is indeed a difficult task to write of the relations between romantic
love and devotional religion and to do it in the grand style. That is
where Dante is so supremely great. And that is why, for all his
greatness, his influence upon modern art has been so morbid and
evil. The odious sensuality of the so-called "Pre-Raphaelite School"
--a sensuality drenched with holy water and perfumed with incense--has
a smell of corruption about it that ought never to be associated
with Dante's name.

The worst of modern poets, the most affected and the most
meticulous, are all anxious to seal themselves of the tribe of Dante.
But they are no more like that divine poet than the flies that feed on
a dead Caesar are like the hero they cause to stink!

Our brave Oscar understood him. Some of the most exquisite
passages in "Intentions" refer to his poetry. Was the "Divine
Comedy" too clear-cut and trenchant for Walter Pater? It is strange
how Dante has been left to second-rate interpreters! His illustrators,
too! O these sentimentalists, with their Beatrices crossing the Ponte
Vecchio, and their sad youths looking on! All this is an insult--a
sacrilege--to the proudest, most aristocratic spirit who ever dwelt on
earth! Why did not Aubrey Beardsley stop that beautiful boy on the
threshold? He who was the model of his "Ave atque vale!" might
have well served for Casella, singing among the cold reeds, in the
white dawn.

For there are scenes in Dante which have the strange, remote,
perverted, _archaic_ loveliness of certain figures on the walls of
Egyptian temples or on the earliest Greek vases. Here the real artist
in him forgets God and Beatrice and the whole hierarchy of the
saints. And it is because of things of this kind that many curious
people are found to be his worshipers who will never themselves
pass forth "to re-behold the stars." They are unwise who find Dante
so bitter and theological, so Platonic and devoted, that they cannot
open his books. They little know what ambiguous planets, what dark
heathen meteors move on the fringe of his great star-lit road. His
Earthly Lady, as well as his Heavenly Lady, may have the moon
beneath her feet.

But neither of them know, as