The trend of the new time,
in very varying degrees, was tending to undermine, not merely
the Christian demonology, not merely the Christian theology,
not merely the Christian religion, but definitely the Christian
ethical ideal, which had seemed to the great agnostic as secure
as the stars.
But while the world was mocking the morality he had assumed,
it was bringing back the mysticism he had mocked. The next phase
of Mr. George Moore himself, whom I have taken as a type of the time,
was the serious and sympathetic consideration of Irish mysticism,
as embodied in Mr. W. B. Yeats. I have myself heard Mr. Yeats,
about that time, tell a story, to illustrate how concrete and even
comic is the reality of the supernatural, saying that he knew
a farmer whom the fairies had dragged out of bed and beaten.
Now suppose Mr. Yeats had told Mr. Moore, then moving in this
glamorous atmosphere, another story of the same sort.
Suppose he had said that the farmer's pigs had fallen under
the displeasure of some magician of the sort he celebrates,
who had conjured bad fairies into the quadrupeds, so that they
went in a wild dance down to the village pond.
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