“SPIRITUAL ADVENTURES”
_Anonymous_:
At your suggestion I have begun to read Arthur Symons’s “Spiritual
Adventures.”
“Christian Trevelga” strikes me, as you predicted, most strongly so far.
Symons is one of the subtlest of minds; everything he writes is worth
reading. This is of his best certainly. What is one to make of him? I
don’t know. I don’t know whether his kind of subtlety is of any earthly
value, or whether it is as valuable as Shelley’s. I can never give up
faith in the human race quite as completely as he does, nor adopt his
attitude of autocratic detachment; yet I never seem to have any real
faith, either.—_Vae victis!_
He is removed from all sense of human values, and lost, always, in
abstract patterns. This particular story is an extraordinary expression
of him—of the prizes and peril of such a state. Oh, hell! what an insult
is put upon us when we are invited to live, and to make such a choice.
Perhaps one makes it: then he is not happy until he has lost himself in
an art that is “something more than an audible dramatization of human
life.” Perhaps he is right. But—