substitutes a spiritual for a physical objective, but sufficient it may be for the moment, and to settle our place in the historical process.
The critic might well reply that certain of my generation delighted in writing with an unscientific partiality of subjects long forbidden. Yet is it not most important to explore especially what has been long forbidden, and to do this not only with the highest moral purpose like the followers of Ibsen, but gaily, out of sheer mischief, or sheer delight in that play of the mind. Donne could be as metaphysical as he pleased and yet never seemed unhuman and hysterical as Shelley often does, because he could be as physical as he pleased; and besides who will thirst for the metaphysical, who have a parched tongue, if we cannot recover the Vision of Evil?
I have felt in certain early works of my own which I have long abandoned, and here and there in the work of others of my generation, a slight sentimental sensuality which is disagreeable and doesn't exist in the work of Donne, let us say, because being permitted to say what he pleased, he was never tempted to linger, or rather to pretend that he could linger, between spirit and sense. How often had I heard men of my time talk of the meeting of spirit and sense, yet there is no meeting but only change upon the instant and it is by the perception of a change like the sudden blacking out of the lights of the stage that passion creates its most violent sensation.
XXXVI
Dowson was now at Dieppe, now at a Normandy village. Wilde too was at Dieppe, and Symons, Beardsley, and others would cross and recross, returning with many tales, and there were letters and telegrams. Dowson wrote a protest against some friend's too vivid essay upon the disorder of his life, and explained that in reality he was living a life of industry in a little Normandy village; but before the letter arrived that friend received a wire "arrested, sell watch and send proceeds." Dowson's watch had been left in London—and then another wire "Am free." Dowson, ran the tale as I heard it ten years after, had got drunk and fought the baker, and a deputation of villagers had gone to the magistrate and pointed out that M Dowson was "one of the most illustrious of English
