" In one of the most
profound of all His creations--"The Palace of Art"--we have presented to
us the soul surrounding itself with everything fair and glad, and in
itself pure, not primarily to the eye, but to the mind: attempting to
achieve its destiny and to fulfil its life in the perfections of
intellectual beauty and aesthetic delight. But the palace of art, _made
the palace of the soul_, becomes its dungeon-house, self-generating and
filling fast with all loathsome and deathly shapes; and the heaven of
intellectual joy becomes at last a more penetrative and intenser hell.
The "Idylls of the King" are but exquisite variations on the one
note--that the only true and high life of humanity is the life of full
and free obedience; and that such life on earth becomes of necessity one
of struggle, sorrow, outward loss and apparent failure. In "Vivien"--the
most remarkable of them all for the subtlety of its conception and the
delicacy of its execution,--the picture is perhaps the darkest and
saddest time can show--that of a nature rich to the utmost in all lower
wisdom of the mind, struggling long and apparently truly against the
flesh, yet all the while dallying with the foul temptation, till the
flesh prevails; and in a moment, swift and sure as the lightning, moral
and spiritual death swoops down, and we see the lost one no more.
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