Our only chance, in this world, of a complete happiness, lies in the measure of our success in shutting the eyes of the mind, and deadening its sense of hearing, and dulling the keenness of its apprehension of the unknown.... As the present passes from us, hardly to be enjoyed except as memory or as hope, and only with an at best partial recognition of the uncertainty or inutility of both, it is with a kind of terror that we wake up, every now and then, to the whole knowledge of our ignorance, and to some perception of where it is leading us. To live through a single day with that overpowering consciousness of our real position, which, in the moments in which alone it mercifully comes, is like blinding light or the thrust of a flaming sword, would drive any man out of his senses.... And so there is a great silent conspiracy between us to forget death; all our lives are spent in busily forgetting death. That is why we are so active about so many things which we know to be unimportant, why we are so afraid of solitude, and so thankful for the company of our fellow creatures. Allowing ourselves for the most part to be vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality, in many dreams, in religion, passion, art; each a forgetfulness, each a symbol of creation.... Each is a kind of sublime selfishness, the saint, the lover, and the artist having each an incommunicable ecstasy which he esteems as his ultimate attainment; however, in his lower moments, he may serve God in action, or do the will of his mistress, or minister to men by showing them a little beauty. But it is before all things an escape.
Mr. Symons finds in his system of æsthetics an escape from Methodism and the Calvinistic threatenings of his childhood. He wishes to escape ‘hell.’ In the story of _Seaward Lackland_ there is a preacher whom Methodism drove to madness. Mr. Symons has turned to Art so that he may not feel the eternal flames taking hold of him.
One endeavours to remember some one or two outstanding novels written by any one of the writers of this group. It must be at once admitted, one fails to recall a great novel. It is true that the great Victorians, Meredith and Hardy, were hard at work at this time; but, then, neither of these writers belongs to this movement. Then there was Kipling, Stevenson, Barrie, and George Moore. With the exception of the last, we have little to do with these here. They do not come within the scope of the present study.