passions have grown weary and exhausted themselves. In the essay
called The Autumn of the Body, Mr. Yeats seems to indicate such a
sequence. Yet, whether the art of any of the writers of the
decadence does really express spiritual things is open to doubt.
The mood in which their work is conceived, a distempered emotion,
through which no new joy quivers, seems too often to tell rather
of exhausted vitality than of the ecstasy of a new life. However
much, too, their art refines itself, choosing, ever rarer and more
exquisite forms of expression, underneath it all an intuition
seems to disclose only the old wolfish lust, hiding itself beneath
the golden fleece of the spirit. It is not the spirit breaking
through corruption, but the life of the senses longing to shine
with the light which makes saintly things beautiful: and it would
put on the jeweled raiment of seraphim, retaining still a heart
of clay smitten through and through with the unappeasable desire
of the flesh: so Rossetti's women, who have around them all the
circumstance of poetry and romantic beauty, seem through their
sucked-in lips to express a thirst which could be allayed in no
spiritual paradise. Art in the decadence in our time might be
symbolized as a crimson figure undergoing a dark crucifixion: the
hosts of light are overcoming it, and it is dying filled with
anguish and despair at a beauty it cannot attain. All these
strange emotions have a profound psychological interest. I do not
think because a spiritual flaw can be urged against a certain phase
of life that it should remain unexpressed. The psychic maladies
which attack all races when their civilization grows old must needs
be understood to be dealt with: and they cannot be understood
without being revealed in literature or art. But in Ireland we
are not yet sick with this sickness. As psychology it concerns
only the curious. Our intellectual life is in suspense. The