han in the choosing by a man of the one creature from whom only death
can separate him; of the one friend, not of a phase of his life, but of
his whole life; of the one soul which will grow and mature always by the
side of his, and having blossomed and borne fruit of good, will gently
fade and droop together with his. But this is not the most holy part of
the choice, for he is choosing also the mother of his children, the
woman who is to give half their nature, half their training, to what
children must mean to every honest man: the one chance he possesses of
living as he would have wished to have lived, of being what he should
wish to have been, his one chance of redeeming his errors, of fulfilling
his hopes, of realizing in a measure his own ideals. And to me such a
choice, and love in the sense of such a choice, become not merely coldly
deliberate, but passionately instinctive, are holy with the holiness
that, as you say, is the only real one; holy in all it implies of
recognized beauty and goodness, of trust and hope, of all the excellence
of which it is at least the supposed forerunner; and its holiness is
that upon which all other holiness, all the truthfulness and justice
and beauty and goodness of mankind, depends. This is how I view the
sanctity of the love between man and woman; how all the greatest poets,
from Homer to Schiller, and from Schiller to Mrs. Browning, have viewed
it; and it is the only possible view that I can conceive."

Baldwin nodded. "This is how I also see the question. But my young
poet is not satisfied with this: he wishes to make men believe in the
holiness of that which is no more holy, and far oftener tends to be
unholy, than eating or drinking; and in order to make mankind adore, he
lavishes all his artistic powers on the construction of an aesthetical
temple wherein to enshrine, on the preparation of poetic incense with
which to surround, this species of holiness, carefully separated from
any extraneous holiness, such as family affection, intellectual
appreciation, moral sympathy; left in its complete unmixed simplicity of
brute appetite and physical longing and physical rapture; and the temple
which he constructs out of all that is beautiful in the world is a
harlot's chamber; and the incense which he cunningly distils out of all
the sights and sounds of Nature are filthy narcotics, which leave the
moral eyes dim, and the moral nerves tremulous, and the moral muscle
unstrung. In his d