its deepest
needs are the subject of greater mastery, greater understanding; so that
I can cease from being distracted by the immensity of modern error. No
great intellect, no great creative power can exist in this country;
because the moment it becomes conscious it is so obsessed by the shams
and the shamelessness that surround it, that instead of devoting itself
to the joys and enrichment of life, it feels impelled by the horrors on
every side to take up the social system and attempt to put it right.
This sterile pitfall is now the temptation of the greatest minds. Your
Shelley, your Coleridge, even your Byron,--what did they do? Menaced by
this same vortex of negative effort, sentenced to intellectual
annihilation if they attempted to straighten out the muddle of
modernity, they fled, or drowned themselves in water or opium."

He had ceased playing with his tuft of hair. His face was distraught
with indignation and with the bitterness of a thwarted love of mankind;
it was also illuminated by the distant dream of a world as he would have
it, so that though he brought down his fist on the corner of Sir
Joseph's table with some weight, the baronet was too much moved to
notice the gesture.

"Things are so bad," he pursued, lightly lowering his voice, "that to
have any genuine insight to-day, any special human feeling to-day, means
perforce to devote these gifts to the social problem, instead of to art
and to beauty. That is the curse of being born into this Age. The
gigantic ghastliness of modern Western civilisation successfully engulfs
every superior brain that comes to being in its midst."

Sir Joseph fell back limply in his chair. He acknowledged the game was
lost before the struggle had actually begun. How could he presume to
strike a bargain with such a man? He remembered Mrs. Delarayne, however,
and braced himself once more.

"There are times," Lord Henry began again, glancing kindly at Sir
Joseph, "when I feel that perhaps I ought at least to risk even my life
in order to do something here, in this country. But what is one man's
life in the face of this sea of blunders? What is even a giant's effort,
against the Lilliputian swarm of modern men who are determined to gain
the precipice?"

"I was hoping," said Sir Joseph quietly, "that I might make you an
offer which would induce you to abandon this mission to the Far East. I
was hoping, in fact, that I might help you."

Lord Henry glanced thoughtfully at th