The Star in the West

136 THE STAR IN THE WEST Can you not see ? I am cut off from God ! Loathsome bull -men in their corruption linked Whisper lewd fancies in my ear. Great fish , Monstrous and flat, with vile malignant eyes , And crawling beetles of gigantic strength , Crushed , mangled , moving , are about me . Go ! Go ! do not touch the carcass of myself That is abased , defiled , abominable .' Then Ulric enters , evidently now totally mad ; the fearful power of his Neronic lust has reft asunder the last thread of his sanity ; in his hand he carries a razor , first he slays Madeline , and then , at his mother's bidding , himself : A blood-gr vapour and a scorpion steam To poison the unrighteous life of God ! 2 Thus does this fearful tragedy end . Gruesome with lust and cruelty , Ulric , a horrible perversion , overcome by the violence of his desires , a second Amnon , a second de Sade . His ideal once at least partially pure , broke , as the truth burst on his ear , into a wild and fearful nightmare ; and in his brutal fury we find that perhaps the Sadism of to-day is but an Avatar of those past days , when our progenitors , like some still ex isting savages , carried on their courtship with club and spear, and solemnized their marriage with rape and ravishment . Still one more phase of perverse love remains for us to study ; the curious lust of man for woman as depicted in “ Jezebel,” a curious manifestation of what is known as Masochism , which after the death of the object of its fascination , grows almost into the vam pire desire of necrophilia . In " A Saint's Damnation ," which is included under the same cover , we see the 1 The Mother's Tragedy , vol . i, p . 165 . 2 Ibid .