beauty, the importance I attach to outward form, and how the world I am
in love with is the world that the eyes can see: or to put the matter in
more conventional language, I am so corrupt and blasé that my faith in
moral beauty is gone, and my power of striving after it also. I have
lost the faculty to discern between good and evil, and this loss has
well nigh brought me back to the ignorance of the child or savage. To
tell the plain truth, nothing seems to me to be worthy either of praise
or blame, and I am but little perturbed by even the most abnormal
actions. My conscience is deaf and dumb. Adultery seems to me the most
commonplace thing possible. I see nothing shocking in a young girl
selling herself.'... 'I find that the earth is all as fair as heaven,
and virtue for me is nothing but the perfection of form.' 'Many a time
and long_,' he continues farther on, '_have I paused in some cathedral,
under the shadow of the marble foliage, when the lights were quivering
in through the stained windows, when the organ unbidden made a low
murmuring of itself, and the wind was breathing amongst the pipes; and I
have plunged my gaze far into the pale blue depths of the almond-shaped
eyes of the Madonna. I have followed with a tender reverence the curves
of that wasted figure of hers, and the arch of her eyebrows, just
visible and no more than that. I have admired her smooth and lustrous
brow, her temples with their transparent chastity, and her cheeks shaded
with a sober virginal colour, more tender than the colour of a
peach-flower. I have counted one by one the fair and golden lashes that
threw their tremulous shade upon it. I have traced out with care in the
subdued tone that surrounds her, the evanescent lines of her throat, so
fragile and inclined so modestly. I have even lifted with an adventuring
hand the folds of her tunic, and have seen unveiled that bosom, maiden
and full of milk, that has never been pressed by any except divine lips.
I have traced out the rare clear veins of it, even to their faintest
branchings. I have laid my finger on it, to draw the white drops forth,