beside the _Morte D'Arthur_ and the _Mabinogion_.

1902.

THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY

Our thoughts and emotions are often but spray flung up from hidden tides
that follow a moon no eye can see. I remember that when I first began to
write I desired to describe outward things as vividly as possible, and
took pleasure, in which there was, perhaps, a little discontent, in
picturesque and declamatory books. And then quite suddenly I lost the
desire of describing outward things, and found that I took little pleasure
in a book unless it was spiritual and unemphatic. I did not then
understand that the change was from beyond my own mind, but I understand
now that writers are struggling all over Europe, though not often with a
philosophic understanding of their struggle, against that picturesque and
declamatory way of writing, against that 'externality' which a time of
scientific and political thought has brought into literature. This
struggle has been going on for some years, but it has only just become
strong enough to draw within itself the little inner world which alone
seeks more than amusement in the arts. In France, where movements are more
marked, because the people are pre-eminently logical, _The Temptation of
S. Anthony_, the last great dramatic invention of the old romanticism,
contrasts very plainly with _Axel_, the first great dramatic invention of
the new; and Maeterlinck has followed Count Villiers de l'Isle Adam.
Flaubert wrote unforgettable descriptions of grotesque, bizarre, and
beautiful scenes and persons, as they show to the ear and to the eye, and
crowded them with historic and ethnographical details; but Count Villiers
de l'Isle Adam swept together, by what seemed a sudden energy, words
behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood, as the flame
glimmers behind the dusky blue and red glass in an Eastern lamp; and
created persons from whom has fallen all even of personal characteristic
except a thirst for that hour when all things shall pass away like a
cloud, and a pride like that of the Magi following their star over many
mountains; while Maeterlinck has plucked away even this thirst and this
pride and set before us faint souls, naked and pathetic shadows already
half vapour and sighing to one another upon the border of the last abyss.
There has been, as I think, a like change in French painting, for one sees
everywhere, instead of the dramatic stories and picturesque moments of an
older s