But he doesn't know it's art--he thinks it is
religion. He thinks that God is preoccupied with such things; 'a full
choral High Mass, at nine o'clock, that's a thing to live and die for,' I
have heard him say. Of course it's a sort of idealism, but you must know
what you are about, and what you are idealising: and you mustn't think that
your kind is better than any other kind of idealising."
He made a pause, and then held out his hand for the book.
"Now here is the same sort of intemperate rapture," he said. "Look at this
introduction! 'It is his very self that his poems give, and the sharpest
jealousy of his name and fame is enkindled by them. Not to find him there,
his passion, endurance, faith, rapture, despair, is merely a confession of
want in ourselves.' That's not sane, you know--it's the intoxication of the
Corybant! It isn't the man himself we want to fix our eyes upon. He felt
these things, no doubt: but we mustn't worship his raptures--we must
worship what he worshipped. This sort of besotted agitation is little
better than a dancing dervish. The poems are little sparks, struck out from
a scrap of humanity by some prodigious and glorious force: but we must
worship the force, not the spark: the spark is only an evidence, a system,
a symbol if you like, of the force. And then see how utterly the man has
lost all sense of proportion--he has spent hours and days in identifying
with uncommon patience the exact date of these tepid scraps, and he says he
is content to have laid a single stone in the "unamended, unabridged,
authentic temple" of his idol's fame.
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