52

the

THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT

moment
of a
crisis,

before the two ways

in

of a

decision,

hesitating

the entangle-

And this ments of a great temptation. casuist of souls will drag forth some horribly stunted or horribly overgrown soul from under its obscure covering, setting it to dance naked before our eyes. He has no mercy on those who have no mercy on
themselves.

In the sense in which that word

narily used, ViUiers has

is

ordi-

no pathos. This is enough to explain why he can never, in the phrase he would have disliked so greatly, "touch the popular heart." His mind is too abstract to contain pity, and it is in his lack of pity that he seems to put himself outside humanity. A chacun son infini, he has said, and in the avidity of his search for the infinite he has no mercy for the blind weakness which
goes stumbling over the
earth,

without so
stars are

much

as

knowing that the sun and

overhead.

He

sees only the gross multitude,

the multitude which has the contentment of the slave.

it

is

cannot pardon stupidity, for incomprehensible to him. He sees,

He

rightly, that stupidity is

more criminal than

is

vice

if

only because vice

curable, stupidity

168
fear,

THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT

betraying certain hiding-places of the
lie

most nearly inaccessible retreats AU that he says we nearest to us. know already we may deny it, but we know it. It is what we are not often at leisure enough with ourselves, sincere enough with ourselves, to realise what we often dare not realise but, when he says it, we know that it is true, and our knowledge of it is his warrant for saying it. He is what he is precisely because he teUs us nothing which we do not already know, or it may be, what we have known and forgotten. The mystic, let it be remembered, has
soul in those

which

nothing in common with the morahst. He speaks only to those who are already prepared to listen to him, and he is indifferent to the

which these or others may draw from his words. A young and profound mystic of our day has figured the influence of wise words upon the foolish and headstrong as "torches thrown into a burning city."
"

" practical

effect

The mystic knows well

which
is is

that

it

is

not always

the soul of the drunkard or the blasphemer

farthest

from the eternal beauty.

He

concerned only with that soul of the soul, that life of life, with which the day's doings