ts of life, were remote, neither questioned nor
accepted, but simply in the background. In the foreground, for the
moment, were a long white road running through a river valley, and little
fortress cities cresting rocky hills, and the black notes of the
cypresses striking on a background of silver olives. In these Peter
believed; and he believed in blue Berovieri goblets, and Gobelin
tapestries, and in a great many other things that he had seen and saw at
this moment; he believed intensely, with a poignant vividness of delight,
in all things visible. For the rest, it was not that he doubted or
wondered much; he had not thought about it enough for that; but it was
all very remote. What was spirit, apart from form? Could it be? If so,
would it be valuable or admirable? It was the shapes and colours of
things, after all, that mattered. As to the pre-existence of things and
their hereafter, Peter seldom speculated; he knew that it was through
entering the workshop (or the play-room, he would rather have said) of
the phenomenal, where the idea took limiting lines and definite shape and
the tangible charm of the sense-apprehended, that life for him became
life. Rodney attained to his real by looking through the manifold veils
of the phenomenal, as through so much glass; Peter to his by an adoring
delight in their complex loveliness. He was not a symbolist; he had no
love of mystic hints and mist-veiled distances; he was George Herbert's

Man who looks on glass
And on it rests his eye,

because glass was so extremely jolly. Rodney looked with the mystic's
eyes on life revealed and emerging behind its symbols; Peter with the
artist's on life expressed in the clean and lovely shapes of things,
their colours and tangible sweetness. To Peter Rodney's idealism would
have been impossibly remote; things, as things, had a delightful concrete
reality that was its own justification. They needed to interpret nothing;
they were themselves; no veils, but the very inner sanctuary.

Both creeds, that of things visible and that of the idea, were good, and
suited to the holders; but for those on whom fortune frequently frowns,
for those whose destiny it is to lose and break and not to attain,
Peter's has drawbacks. Things do break so; break and get lost and are no
more seen; and that hurts horribly. Remains the idea, Rodney would have
said; that, being your own, does not get lost unless you throw it away;
and, unless you are a fool, you