Wickham Vane might have been pursuing his peculiar vocation at that moment from his absorbed expression. But he roused himself from his abstraction to pay the homage of attention to his elder brother.
Egerton Vane held a large sheet of paper in his hand, but before reading from it he prepared his hearers’ minds by a short allocution.
“The poem I am about to read you strikes an entirely new note in literature, the note of the unreal. It is a ‘Sonnet to a Drawer in a Japanese Cabinet.’ I have come to the conclusion that all the poets who have preceded me have been mistaken in thinking that Nature was poetical. The artificial only is poetical, because only Art can be artistic. Nature is incapable of symbolism, and the symbol alone is truly beautiful. All the glorious sins which reveal themselves crudely and grossly in mere human beings are latent in exquisite suggestion in the divinely precious works of Art. Even the handicrafts of the East are steeped in the splendid sensuality of its peoples. In this poem I have attempted to do justice to the subtle and elusive vice which clings like the aroma of putrefying rose-leaves to the workmanship of a Japanese cabinet in my possession.”
The poet proceeded to read:
SONNET
TO A DRAWER IN A JAPANESE CABINET
What shadow of dead secrets, lemon-eyed,
Lurks in thy black recesses, frightful drawer,
Crowned with the Pagan scent of delicate gore
Fresh from the veins of some green suicide?