The preoccupation of our Art and Literature with knowledge, with the
surface of life, with the arbitrary, with mechanism, has arisen out of
the root. A careful but not necessarily very subtle man could foretell
the history of any religion if he knew its first principle, and that it
would live long enough to fulfil itself. The mind can never do the same
thing twice over, and having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it
passes to the strange and hidden, and at last must find its delight,
having outrun its harmonies in the emphatic and discordant. When I was a
boy at the art school I watched an older student late returned from
Paris, with a wonder that had no understanding in it. He was very
amorous, and every new love was the occasion of a new picture, and every
new picture was uglier than its forerunner. He was excited about his
mistress's eyebrows, as was fitting, but the interest of beauty had
been exhausted by the logical energies of Art, which destroys where it
has rummaged, and can but discover, whether it will or no. We cannot
discover our subject matter by deliberate intellect, for when a subject
matter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere, and when it moves us,
even though it be 'that old ballad material of Shakespeare' or even 'the
morbid terror of death,' we can laugh at reason. We must not ask is the
world interested in this or that, for nothing is in question but our own
interest, and we can understand no other. Our place in the Hierarchy is
settled for us by our choice of a subject matter, and all good criticism
is hieratic, delighting in setting things above one another, Epic and
Drama above Lyric and so on, and not merely side by side. But it is our
instinct and not our intellect that chooses. We can deliberately
refashion our characters, but not our painting or our poetry. If our
characters also were not unconsciously refashioned so completely by the
unfolding of the logical energies of Art, that even simple things have
in the end a new aspect in our eyes, the Arts would not be among those
things that return for ever. The ballads that Bishop Percy gathered
returned in the _Ancient Mariner_ and the delight in the world of old
Greek sculptors sprang into a more delicate loveliness in that
archaistic head of the young athlete down the long corridor to your left
hand as you go into the British Museum. Civilisation too, will not that
also destroy where it has loved, until it shall bring the simple and
natural things again and a new Argo with all the gilding on her bows
sail out to find another fleece?