And later, in that awful page of the tragedy of a fallen soul, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, there is a sort of blind recognition of the justice of Karma, which tolerates no perversion of Nature's order on any plane, coupled with a noble and generous plea for the removal of the unnecessary horrors of the prisons, in which we grind out the last vestige of man's inherent love of virtue, and crush the last buds of growth that the fallen soul may yet be able to put forth.
Here again was one, who exalted the beauty of the senses above the beauty of the soul, and so soiled the whole nature and so perverted the mind, which is the mirror of the man, that he produced a vortex of vice, in which all who entered were bewildered and lost their guiding star; in which many were utterly wrecked, and all defiled.
Professor Henderson in his critical interpretation of five authors, points out so much of the evil that one can only regret that his grasp of true psychology was not deep enough to enable him to make more clear the distinction between the spiritual soul and the animal soul (not to go further into the complex nature of the Soul), the great duality in man that is the clue to all these mysteries. With this key one feels that his study of Maeterlinck's philosophy would have become more luminous, for surely this is a case, in which an author continually confuses his audience, and perhaps also himself, by exalting the sensuous joys of the animal soul, and the emotions of the imagination, above the pure joy of true beauty, which is, as all poets, not only Keats, have seen, the same as truth. Keats himself may have known the difference, but his readers certainly must in most instances have been misled and may have found in his lines a justification of their own indulgence of morbid tastes, for however morbid may be a man's condition he will still see beauty in pleasure of any kind, no matter how vile may be its source. We may endorse the axiom in the first line
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
but must protest against the fallacy in the next line
... that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
No! we need to know what we mean by beauty, and we need to know that the word conceals pitfalls innumerable for him who has no knowledge of the true nature of man, for one who thinks he is his body, and who believes his passions are the voices of his soul and who mistakes the intoxication of sensuality for spiritual illumination, lust for love, and perversion for genius. We need the teaching so clearly given in "The Two Paths" translated by H. P. Blavatsky from The Book of the Golden Precepts. We need to know that there is a chasm deep as hell between these two souls in man, and that when the higher nature is the slave of the lower then the man is in hell indeed; for as said by H. P. Blavatsky, there is no other hell than that of a man-bearing planet. Those who have stood on the brink of this hell with even partially opened eyes, know that the terrors of hell invented by churchmen are but as a comic interlude to the reality of horrors that life on earth holds for masses of humanity, and from which there is no escape except by the path of right living, based upon right perception of our own true nature, and discrimination between the higher and the lower nature in man, which is so often veiled by the false teachings of perverted minds. We need the truth to discriminate the spiritual beauty that is pure joy from the sensual beauty that intoxicates, blinds, and destroys the life—and we need the guiding power of pure altruism to make our writings useful to others and a full recognition of the responsibility of those who now so lightly use "those living messengers we call words."