strain, I must repeat again how provisional and personal I know all
these things to be. I began by disavowing ultimates. My beliefs, my
dogmas, my rules, they are made for my campaigning needs, like the
knapsack and water-bottle of a Cockney soldier invading some stupendous
mountain gorge. About him are fastnesses and splendours, torrents and
cataracts, glaciers and untrodden snows. He comes tramping on heel-worn
boots and ragged socks. Beauties and blue mysteries shine upon him and
appeal to him, the enigma of beauty smiling the faint strange smile of
Leonardo's Mona Lisa. He sees a light on the grass like music; and
the blossom on the trees against the sky brings him near weeping. Such
things come to him, give themselves to him. I do not know why he should
not in response fling his shabby gear aside and behave like a god; I
only know that he does not do so. His grunt of appreciation is absurd,
his speech goes like a crippled thing--and withal, and partly by virtue
of the knapsack and water-bottle, he is conqueror of the valley. The
valley is his for the taking.

There is a duality in life that I cannot express except by such images
as this, a duality so that we are at once absurd and full of sublimity,
and most absurd when we are most anxious to render the real splendours
that pervade us. This duplicity in life seems to me at times
ineradicable, at times like the confusing of something essentially
simple, like the duplication when one looks through a doubly refracting
medium. You think in this latter mood that you have only to turn the
crystal of Iceland spar about in order to have the whole thing plain.
But you never get it plain. I have been doing my halting utmost to get
down sincerely and simply my vision of life and duty. I have permitted
myself no defensive restraints; I have shamelessly written my starkest,
and it is plain to me that a smile that is not mine plays over my most
urgent passages. There is a rebellious rippling of the grotesque under
our utmost tragedy and gravity. One's martialled phrases grimace as one
turns, and wink at the reader. None the less they signify. Do you note
how in this that I have written, such a word as Believer will begin to
wear a capital letter and give itself solemn ridiculous airs? It does
not matter. It carries its message for all that necessary superficial
absurdity.

Thought has made me shameless. It does not matter at last at all if one
is a little harsh or indelicate or