XI

ALL this I have told to you because we have known together the closest

intimacy possible to human beings--we have shared beauty.

They said, these many days ago, that you had gone away, that you were

dead. The wind on the Downs, your favourite Downs, your favourite

southwest wind, received your dust, scattering it like pollen into

space. No sign has come to me, no other sign than this I tell you now

in my long letter. It is enough. I know.

There were thus two loves, one unrecognized till afterwards, the other

realized at the time.... In the body there was promise. There is now

accomplishment.

It is very strange, and yet so simple. Beauty, I suppose, opens the

heart, extends the consciousness. It is a platitude, of course. You

will laugh when I tell you that afterwards I tried to reason it all

out. I am not apparently intellectual. The books I read would fill

your empty room--on aesthetics, art, and what not. I got no result

from any of them, but rather a state of muddle that was, no doubt,

congestion. None of the theories and explanations touched the root of

the matter. I am evidently not "an artist"--that at any rate I

gathered, and yet these learned people seemed to write about

something they had never "lived." I could almost believe that the

writers of these subtle analyses have never themselves felt

beauty--the burn, the rapture, the regenerating fire. They have

known, perhaps, a reaction of the physical nerves, but never this

light within the soul that lifts the horizons of the consciousness and

makes one know that God exists, that death is not even separation,

and that eternity is now.

Metaphysics I studied too. I fooled myself, thirty years after the

proper time for doing so, over the old problem whether beauty lies in

the object seen or in the mind that sees the object. And in the end I

came back hungrily to my simple starting-point--that beauty moved me.

It opened my heart to one of its many aspects--truth, wisdom, joy,

and love--and what else, in the name of heaven, mattered!

I sold the books at miserable prices that made Mother question my

judgment: coloured plates, costly bindings, rare editions, and all.

Aesthetics, Art, rules and principles might go hang for all I cared

or any good they did me. It was intellect that had devised all these.

The truth was simpler far. I cared nothing for these scholarly

explanations of beauty's genesis and laws of working, because I felt

it. Hunger needs no analysis, does it? Nor does Love. Could anything

be more stultifying? Give to the first craving a lump of bread, and

to the second a tangible man or woman--and let those who have the

time analyse both cravings at their leisure.

For the thrill I mean is never physical, and has nothing in common

with that acute sensation experienced when the acrobat is seen to

miss the rope in mid-air as he swings from bar to bar. There is no

shock in it, for shock is of the nerves, arresting life; the thrill I

speak of intensifies and sets it rising in a wave that flows. It is of

the spirit. It wounds, yet marvellously. It is unearthly. Therein, I

think, lies its essential quality; by chance, as it were, in writing

this intimate confession, I have hit upon the very word: it is

unearthly, it contains surprise. Yes, Beauty wounds marvellously,

then follows the new birth, regeneration. There is a ravishment of

the entire being into light and knowledge.

The element of surprise is certainly characteristic. The thrill comes

unheralded--a sudden uprush of convincing joy loosed from some store

that is inexhaustible. Unlike the effect of a nervous shock which can

be lived over and reconstituted, it knows no repetition; its climax

is instantaneous, there is neither increase nor declension; it is

unrecoverable; it strikes and is gone. Breaking across the

phantasmagoria of appearances, it comes as a flash of reality, a

lightning recognition of something that cannot be travestied. It is

not in time. It is eternity.

I suspect you know it now with me; in fact I am certain that you

do....

I remember how, many years ago--in that delightful period between

boyhood and manhood when we felt our wings and argued about the

universe--we discovered this unearthly quality in three different

things: the song of a bird, the eyes of a child, and a wild-flower

come upon unexpectedly in a scene of desolation. For in all three, we

agreed, shines that wonder which holds adoration, that joy which is

spontaneous and uncalculated, and that surprise which pertains to

Eternity looking out triumphantly upon ephemeral things.

So, at least, in our youthful eagerness, we agreed; and to this day

one in particular of the three--a bird's song--always makes me think

of God. That divine, ecstatic, simple sound is to me ever both

surprising and unearthly. Each time it takes me by surprise--that

people do not hush their talk to kneel and listen.... And of the eyes

of little children--if there is any clearer revelation granted to us

of what is unearthly in the sense of divinity brought close, I do not

know it. Each time my spirit is arrested by surprise, then filled

with wondering joy as I meet that strange open look, so stainless,

accepting the universe as its rightful toy, and, as with the bird and

flower, saying Yes to life as though there could not possibly exist a

No.

The wildflower too: you recall once--it was above Igls when the

Tyrolean snows were melting--how we found a sudden gentian on the

dead, pale grass? The sliding snows had left the coarse tufts stroked

all one way, white and ugly, thickly streaked with mud, no single

blade with any sign of life or greenness yet, when we came upon that

star of concentrated beauty, more blue than the blue sky overhead, the

whole passion of the earth in each pointed petal. A distant

avalanche, as though the hills were settling, the bustle of the

torrent, the wind in the pines and larches, only marked by contrast

the incredible stillness of the heights--then, suddenly, this star of

blue blazing among the desolation. I recall your cry and my

own--wonder, joy, as of something unearthly--that took us by

surprise.

In these three, certainly, lay the authentic thrill I speak of; while

it lasts, the actual moment seems but a pedestal from which the eyes

of the heart look into Heaven, a pedestal from which the soul leaps

out into the surrounding garden of limitless possibilities which are

its birthright, and immediately accessible. And that, indeed, is the

essential meaning of the thrill--that Heaven is here and now. The

gates of ivory are very tiny; Beauty sounds the elfin horns that

opens them; smaller than the eye of a needle is that opening--upon

the diamond point of the thrill you flash within, and the Garden of

Eternity is yours for ever--now.

I am writing this to you, because I know you listen with your heart,

not with your nerves; and the garden that I write about you know now

better than I do myself. I have but tasted it, you dwell therein,

unaged, unageing. And so we share the flowers; we know the light, the

fragrance and the birds we know together.... They tell me--even our

mother says it sometimes with a sigh--that you are far away, not

understanding that we have but recovered the garden of our early

childhood, you permanently, I whenever the thrill opens the happy

gates. You are as near to me as that. Our love was forged inside

those ivory gates that guard that childhood state, facing four ways,

and if I wandered outside a-while, puzzled and lonely, the thrill of

beauty has led me back again, and I, have found your love unchanged,

unaged, still growing in the garden of our earliest memories. I did

but lose my way for a time....

That childhood state must be amazingly close to God, I suppose, for

though no child is consciously aware of beauty, its whole being cries

Yes to the universe and life as naturally and instinctively as a

flower turns to the sun. The universe lies in its overall pocket of

alpaca, and beauty only becomes a thing apart when the growing

consciousness, hearing the world cry No, steps through the gates to

enquire and cannot find the entrance any more. Beauty then becomes a

signpost showing the way home again. Baudelaire, of course, meant God

and Heaven, instead of "genius" when he said, "Le genie n'est que

l'enfance retrouvee a volonte...."

And so when I write to you, I find myself again within the garden of

our childhood, that English garden where our love shared all the

light and fragrance and flowers of the world together. "Time's but a

golden wind that shakes the grass," and since my thought is with you,

you are with me now... and now means always or it means nothing.

So these relationships are real still among a thousand shadows. Your

beauty was truth, hers was unselfish love. The important thing is to

know you still live, not with regret and selfish grief, but with that

joy and sure conviction which makes the so-called separation a

temporary test, perhaps, but never a final blow. What are the few

years of separation compared to this certainty of co-operation in

eternity? We live but a few years together in the flesh, yet if those

few are lived with beauty and beautifully, the tie is unalterably

forged which fastens us lovingly together for ever. Where, how,

under what precise conditions it were idle to enquire and

unnecessary--the wrong way too. Our only knowledge (in the scientific

sense) comes to us through our earthly senses. To forecast our future

life, constructing it of necessity upon this earthly sensory

experience, is an occupation for those who have neither faith nor

imagination. All such "heavens" are but clumsy idealizations of the

present--"Happy Hunting Grounds" in various forms: whereas we know

that if we lived beauty together, we shall live it always--"afterwards,"

as our poor time-ridden language phrases it. For Beauty, once known,

cannot exclude us. We cooperated with the Power that makes the universe

alive.

And, knowing this, I do not ask for your "return," or for any

so-called evidence that you survive. In beauty you both live now with

less hampered hands, less troubled breath, and I am glad.

Why should you come, indeed, through the gutter of my worn, familiar,

personal desires, when the open channel of beauty lies ever at the

flood for you to use? Coming in this way, you come, besides, for

many, not for me alone, since behind every thrill of beauty stand the

countless brave souls who lived it in their lives. They have entered

the mighty rhythm that floats the spiral nebulae in space, as it turns

the little aspiring Nautilus in the depths of the sea. Having once

felt this impersonal worship which is love of beauty, they are linked

to the power that drives the universe towards perfection, the power

that knocks in a million un-advertised forms at every human heart:

and that is God.

With that beneficent power you cooperate. I ask no other test. I crave

no evidence that you selfishly remember me. In the body we did not

know so closely. To see into your physical eyes, and touch your hand,

and hear your voice--these were but intermediary methods, symbols, at

the best. For you I never saw nor touched nor heard. I felt you--in

my heart. The closest intimacy we knew was when together we shared

one moment of the same beauty; no other intimacy approaches the

reality of that; it is now strengthened to a degree unrealized

before. For me that is enough. I have that faith, that certainty,

that knowledge. Should you come to me otherwise I must disown you.

Should you stammer through another's earthly lips that you now enjoy

a mere idealized repetition of your physical limitations, I should

know my love, my memory, my hope degraded, nay, my very faith

destroyed.

To summon you in that way makes me shudder. It would be to limit your

larger uses, your wider mission, merely to numb a selfish grief born

of a faithless misunderstanding.

Come to me instead--or, rather, stay, since you have never left--be

with me still in the wonder of dawn and twilight, in the yearning

desire of inarticulate black night, in the wind, the sunshine, and

the rain. It is then that I am nearest to you and to your beneficent

activity, for the same elemental rhythm of Beauty includes us both.

The best and highest of you are there; I want no lesser assurance, no

broken personal revelation. Eternal beauty brings you with an

intimacy unknown, impossible, indeed, to partial disclosure. I should

abhor a halting masquerade, a stammering message less intelligible

even than our intercourse of the body.

Come, then! Be with me, your truth and Marion's tenderness linked

together with what is noblest in myself. Be with me in the simple

loveliness of an English garden where you and I, as boys together,

first heard that voice of wonder, and knew the Presence walking with

us among the growing leaves.