rie publishers and elfin clerks, till he
returns and again puts things inside him, and then sits down and
makes men in his own head and writes down all that they said and did.
And last of all comes the real life itself. For half-an-hour he
writes words upon a scrap of paper, words that are not picked and
chosen like those that he has used to parry the strange talk of the
folk all day, but words in which the soul's blood pours out, like the
body's blood from a wound. He writes secretly this mad diary, all his
passion and longing, all his queer religion, his dark and dreadful
gratitude to God, his idle allegories, the tales that tell themselves
in his head; the joy that comes on him sometimes (he cannot help it!)
at the sacred intoxication of existence: the million faults of
idleness and recklessness and the one virtue of the unconquered
adoration of goodness, that dark virtue that every man has, and hides
deeper than all his vices--he writes all this down as he is writing
it now. And he knows that if he sticks it down and puts a stamp on it
and drops it into the mouth of a little red goblin at the corner of
the street--he knows that all this wild soliloquy will be poured into
the soul of one wise and beautiful lady sitting far away beyond seas
and rivers and cities, under the shadow of an alien Cathedral. . . .
This is not all so irrelevant as you may think. It was this line of
feeling that taught me, an utter Rationalist as far as dogma goes,
the lesson of the entire Spirituality of things--an opinion that
nothing has ever shattered since. I can't express myself on the
point, nobody can. But it is _only_ the spirituality of things that
we are sure of. That the eyes in your face are eyes I do not know:
they may have other names and uses. I know that they are _good_ or
beautiful, or rather spiritual. I do not know on what principle the
Universe is run, I know or feel that it is _good_ or spiritual. I do
not know what Gertrude's death was--I know that it was beautiful, for
I saw it. We do not feel that it is so beautiful now--why? Because we
do not see it now. What we see now is her absence: but her Death is
not her absence, but her Presence somewhere else. That is what we
_knew_ was beautiful, as long as we could see it. Do not be
frightened, dearest, by the slow inevitable laws of human nature, we
shall climb back into