No More Learning

Towards the close it is suggested that, caught in a cunning
spring set for another, they have met, or may meet, with a violent and
sudden death. But a tragic ending of this kind, though touched by
Hamlet's humour with something of the surprise and justice of comedy, is
really not for such as they. They never die. Horatio, who in order to
'report Hamlet and his cause aright to the unsatisfied,'

'Absents him from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,'

dies, but Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo and
Tartuffe, and should rank with them. They are what modern life has
contributed to the antique ideal of friendship. He who writes a new _De
Amicitia_ must find a niche for them, and praise them in Tusculan prose.
They are types fixed for all time. To censure them would show 'a lack of
appreciation. ' They are merely out of their sphere: that is all. In
sublimity of soul there is no contagion. High thoughts and high emotions
are by their very existence isolated.

* * * * *

I am to be released, if all goes well with me, towards the end of May,
and hope to go at once to some little sea-side village abroad with R---
and M---.

The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigeneia, washes
away the stains and wounds of the world.

I hope to be at least a month with my friends, and to gain peace and
balance, and a less troubled heart, and a sweeter mood. I have a strange
longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no
less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at
Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in
the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed
whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw
that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the
runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the
forest for its silence at noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair
with ivy that he might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over
the young shoots, and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that
Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter
laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no service to men.

We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single
thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and
that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the
moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and deals
directly with things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there is
purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.

Of course to one so modern as I am, 'Enfant de mon siecle,' merely to
look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I
think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the
lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir
into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss
the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for
me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the
first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the
tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to
whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of
some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not
a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a
shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my
nature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have always been one of those
'pour qui le monde visible existe. '

Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though
it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and
shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I
desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate
utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life,
the Mystical in Nature this is what I am looking for. It is absolutely
necessary for me to find it somewhere.

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences
of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the
box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of
detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society,
as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer;
but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have
clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence
I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may
walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my
footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in
great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.



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