selves and the life that
is in us. We shall utter ourselves in the finest speech in the world,
and, our children being properly born and bred, it shall be in the
finest terms of the finest speech in the world. To do this is to have
lived.

HERBERT.

XXIX

FROM DANE KEMPTON TO HERBERT WACE

LONDON,
3A, QUEEN'S ROAD, CHELSEA, S.W.
August 26, 19--.

You insist that the question is not on the value of love but on the
significance of the artificial. Be that as it may. To me love is
integral with life, and to speak of civilising it away, seems, in point
of fact, as preposterous and as anomalous as a Hamletless play of
Hamlet. You forget that in developing you carry yourself along; you
change, yet you remain racial and natural. Else there were too many
missing links in all your departments. We read Homer to-day--telling
proof that the chain of sympathy stretches unbroken through epochs of
inventions and discoveries and revolutions. Truism that it is, it
presents itself with particular force at this stage.

With how much force? We stand in danger of exaggerating these vociferous
thoughts. This question of naturalness as opposed to artificiality is
not immediately pertinent to our problem, nor is the matter of optimism
and pessimism, nor the biologic idea of survival. We should have looked
more to the way of love in the lives of men and women and become
historians of the method and conduct of the force. There would have been
less confusion. So I write, "Be that as it may," and go back to more
immediate considerations. And yet we were not far wrong! The little
flower in the crannied wall could tell what God and man is. This is of
all thoughts the most charged with truth. Let me understand one of your
conclusions, root and all, and all in all, and such is the gracious plan
of oneness in the branching and leafage and uptowering, that I must know
and name the tree. Your winding bypath, could I but follow it to the
end, must bring me to the highway of your thought, every step tell-tale
of the journey's destination. But soon I shall be with you (the fifth
of next month, after all; the arrangements as planned). Then we will
begin to know each other, and we will no longer be tormented by the
irksomeness of writing. Therefore, until easier and more fluent times,
to the heart of the subject straight.

Your love-affairs--how well you have outgrown them and how ably you
criticise them! They have not withstood the test of