And yet, after the broken music of love and the burial of
love in the autumn woods, we can trace that wandering among strange
people, and in lands unknown to us, by which we try so pathetically
to heal the hurts of the life we know, and that pure and passionate
devotion to Art which one gets when the harsh reality of life has
too suddenly wounded one, and is with discontent or sorrow marring
one's youth, just as often, I think, as one gets it from any
natural joy of living; and that curious intensity of vision by
which, in moments of overmastering sadness and despair
ungovernable, artistic things will live in one's memory with a
vivid realism caught from the life which they help one to forget--
an old grey tomb in Flanders with a strange legend on it, making
one think how, perhaps, passion does live on after death; a
necklace of blue and amber beads and a broken mirror found in a
girl's grave at Rome, a marble image of a boy habited like Eros,
and with the pathetic tradition of a great king's sorrow lingering
about it like a purple shadow,--over all these the tired spirit
broods with that calm and certain joy that one gets when one has
found something that the ages never dull and the world cannot harm;
and with it comes that desire of Greek things which is often an
artistic method of expressing one's desire for perfection; and that
longing for the old dead days which is so modern, so incomplete, so
touching, being, in a way, the inverted torch of Hope, which burns
the hand it should guide; and for many things a little sadness, and
for all things a great love; and lastly, in the pinewood by the
sea, once more the quick and vital pulse of joyous youth leaping
and laughing in every line, the frank and fearless freedom of wave
and wind waking into fire life's burnt-out ashes and into song the
silent lips of pain,--how clearly one seems to see it all, the long
colonnade of pines with sea and sky peeping in here and there like
a flitting of silver; the open place in the green, deep heart of
the wood with the little moss-grown altar to the old Italian god in
it; and the flowers all about, cyclamen in the shadowy places, and
the stars of the white narcissus lying like snow-flakes over the
grass, where the quick, bright-eyed lizard starts by the stone, and
the snake lies coiled lazily in the sun on the hot sand, and
overhead the gossamer floats from the branches like thin, tremulous
threads of gold,--the scene is so perfect for its motive, for
surely here, if anywhere, the real gladness of life might be
revealed to one's youth--the gladness that comes, not from the
rejection, but from the absorption, of all passion, and is like
that serene calm that dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, and
which despair and sorrow cannot touch, but intensify only.
In some such way as this we could gather up these strewn and
scattered petals of song into one perfect rose of life, and yet,
perhaps, in so doing, we might be missing the true quality of the
poems; one's real life is so often the life that one does not lead;
and beautiful poems, like threads of beautiful silks, may be woven
into many patterns and to suit many designs, all wonderful and all
different: and romantic poetry, too, is essentially the poetry of
impressions, being like that latest school of painting, the school
of Whistler and Albert Moore, in its choice of situation as opposed
to subject; in its dealing with the exceptions rather than with the
types of life; in its brief intensity; in what one might call its
fiery-coloured momentariness, it being indeed the momentary
situations of life, the momentary aspects of nature, which poetry
and painting new seek to render for us.