CHAPTER I THROUGH COMMERCIALISM POETRY in these days often fails mournfully of her divine mission, though still bearing her flickering torch through the darkness. Once Religion and Poetry gained much from each other. Poetry gained from the authority of Religion and Religion gained from the humanity of Poetry; but as Religion more and more withdrew from the authority of Humanity, so Poetry withdrew from Religion. Though written from a religious point of view and with a religious intent, nothing concerning the state of the world remains so true as Cardinal Newman's description: "To consider the world in its length and breadth; its various history; the many races of man; their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their the ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and requirements; the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turns out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; greatness and littleness of man; his farreaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity; the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil; physical pain, mental anguish; the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions; the dreary, hopeless irreligion; that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, Having no hope and without God in the world-all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution. What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded Cast out of the House of Wisdom and the Place of Understanding, expelled from the Temple of Thought-out of its mind, in the saddest sense-the world certainly seems. If Philip Bailey's character of Satan be true— and it surely has deep insight-namely, that he has "a profound knowledge of surfaces," mankind would seem especially to suffer from demoniacal possession in the present age. True it is, no doubt, that "Necessity urges him on; Time will not stop, neither can he, a son of Time. Wild passions without solace, wild faculties without employment ever vex and agitate him."" Yet besides and beyond this, what produces so vivid an impression of Satanic agency as contact with beings who are entirely engrossed in externals? Such persons are more unearthly than the soulless Undine of the German legend; because they force their souls to minister to 1 Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ, pp. 241–242. 2 Sartor Resartus, p. 115. their senses, instead of teaching their senses to minister to their souls. Their souls are dissipated into their senses, with the result that their emotions demand eternal excitement; yet, do what they will, they remain discontented, peevish, neurotic; because they cannot narcotise themselves with sensation, sufficiently to prevent their souls from clamouring and wailing to return to their rightful habitation. If this be at all a faithful portrait of the Spirit of the Age, there need be no compulsion to define terms. Words that convey a true idea justify themselves. The desire for joy, which inhabits that part of us that we call the soul, can only be satisfied by the closest union of our soul with our mind; that is, by imagination or passion of intellect, through which alone is the search for God possible. But how can such union be maintained at a time when money is the one all-powerful force (for Balzac's words are as true as ever), when money is the law-giver, socially and politically? "One hope and one ambition possess us all, to pass per fas et |