I cannot love you if I love not Him,
I cannot love Him if I love not you.
[Footnote: _Monna Innominata_, VI. See also Robert Bridges, _The of
Love_ (a sonnet sequence).]

It is obvious that, from the standpoint of the beloved at least, there
is danger in this identification of all beauties as manifestations of
the ideal. It is unpropitious to lifelong affection for one person. As a
matter of fact, though the English taste for decorous fidelity has
affected some poets, on the whole they have not hesitated to picture
their race as fickle. Plato's account of the second step in the ascent
of the lover, "Soon he will himself perceive that the beauty of one form
is truly related to the beauty of another; and then if beauty in general
is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty
in every form is one and the same," [Footnote: _Symposium_, Jowett
translation, Sec.210.] is made by Shelley the justification of his shifting
enthusiasms, which the world so harshly censured. In _Epipsychidion_
Shelley declares,

I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion....

True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright
Gazing on many truths....

Narrow the heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.

These last lines suggest, what many poets have asserted, that the
goddess of beauty is apt to change her habitation from one clay to
another, and that the poet who clings to the fair form after she has
departed, is nauseated by the dead bones which he clasps. [Footnote: See
Thomas Hardy's novel, _The Well Beloved_.] This theme Rupert Brooke
is constantly harping upon, notably in _Dead Men's Love_, which
begins,

There was a damned successful poet,
There was a woman like the Sun.
And they were dead. They did not know it.
They did not know his hymns
Were silence; and her limbs
That had served love so well,
Dust, and a filthy smell.

The feeling that Aphrodite is leading them a merry chase through
manyforms is characteristic of our ultra-modern poets, who anticipate at
least one new love affair a year. Most elegantly Ezra