chievement is the recognition
of the fact that there is a puzzle. There are many people who go
through life persuaded that there isn't a puzzle at all; that it was
only the infancy and rude childhood of the world which dreamed a vain
dream of a picture to be made out of the jagged bits of wood, There
never has been a picture, these persons say, and there never will be
a picture, all we have to do is to take the bits out of the box, look
at them, and put them back again. Or, returning to Richard
Middleton's excellent example: there is no such thing as London,
there are only houses. No man has seen London at any time; the very
word (meaning "the fort on the lake") is nonsensical; no human eye
has ever beheld aught else but a number of houses; it is clear that
this "London" is as mythical and monstrous and irrational a concept
as many others of the same class. Well, people who talk like that are
doubtless sent into the world for some useful but mysterious process;
but they can't write real books. Richard Middleton knew that there
was a puzzle; in other words, that the universe is a great mystery;
and this consciousness of his is the source of the charm of "The
Ghost Ship."

I have compared this orthodox view of life and the
universe and the fine art that results from this view to the solving
of a puzzle; but the analogy is not an absolutely perfect one. For if
you buy a jig-saw in a box in the Haymarket, you take it home with
you and begin to put the pieces together, and sooner or later the
toil is over and the difficulties are overcome: the picture is clear
before you. Yes, the toil is over, but so is the fun; it is but poor
sport to do the trick all over again. And here is the vast
inferiority of the things they sell in the shops to the universe: our
great puzzle is never perfectly solved. We come across marvellous
hints, we join line to line and our hearts beat with the rapture of a
great surmise; we follow a certain track and know by sure signs and
signals that we are not mistaken, that we are on the right road; we
are furnished with certain charts which tell us "here there be
water-pools," "here is a waste place," "here a high hill riseth," and
we find as we journey that so it is. But, happily, by the very nature
of the case, we can never put the whole of the picture together, we
can never recover the perfect utterance of the Lost Word, we can
never say "here is the end of all the journey." Man is so made that
all h