Though
penetrated, impregnated with art, as yet he had not produced anything
remarkable. Eager in the pursuit of pleasure and of love, he had never
yet really loved or really enjoyed whole-heartedly. Tortured by
aspirations after an Ideal, and abhorring pain both by nature and
education, he was vulnerable on every side, accessible to pain at every
point.
In the tumult of his conflicting inclinations, he had lost all guiding
will-power and moral perception. Will, in abdicating had yielded the
sceptre to instinct and the aesthetic sense was substituted for the
moral. But, it was nevertheless precisely to his aesthetic sense--in him
most subtle and powerful--that he owed a certain strength and
equilibrium of mind, so that one might say his existence was a perpetual
struggle between contrary forces, enclosed within the limits of that
equilibrium. Men of intellect, educated in the cult of the beautiful,
preserve a certain sense of order even in their worst depravities. The
conception of the beautiful is, so to speak, the axis of their being,
round which all their passions revolve.
Over this sadness, the recollection of Constance Landbrooke still
floated like a faded perfume. His love for Conny had been a very
delicate affair, for she was a very sweet little creature. She was like
one of Lawrence's creations, with all the dainty feminine graces so dear
to that painter of furbelows and laces and velvets, of lustrous eyes and
pouting lips, a very re-incarnation of the little Countess of
Shaftesbury.
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