Though I had no intention of buying many books, the dreary loneliness
of the tavern where I supped drove me out upon the streets, and
insensibly I drifted towards my favourite second-hand book-shop, where
the little maiden behind the mountains of Welsh theology reminds me of
someone I know. My Welsh Divinity I call her, hovering bright-winged
above the dust-clouds of old literature, with clear grey eyes and
nervous mouth. Not "the heir of all the ages," I fear, though the
potentiality in her must be infinite and beyond my ken. "What do you,
oh, young man?" So I seem to read the query in her eyes. "Are you only
a hodman in this book-yard, then? Where is _she_? What is _she_? Who
is _she_?" As I stand and thumb the serried ranks of corpses, I feel
her gaze upon me. Quite inarticulate, both of us, you understand--I as
shy as she.
I must seem extraordinarily sensitive to you, I think. Merely the
presence of this child stirs my soul to nobler ideals. I feel
invigorated and refreshed. So my lady stirs me; so even the mere
presence of some men we know. In like manner, I imagine, is my friend
influenced by superb music. They affect me like an essay by Pater, a
Watts portrait, or a Dulwich Cuyp, a feeling which I can only call a
passionate intellectualism, a loosening of corporeal encumbrances. My
friend will not carp because I seem to place my love for my mistress
in a category with a Dutch landscape and an aesthetic essay--he will
understand.
I have no desire to be proud, but I confess I have never appreciated
that amorousness which prompts the lovers to exchange hats as well as
vows. Indeed, I scarcely understand what the older poets mean by vows
even. What are these vows? By whom are they kept? Of what avail are
they when they are most needed? Nearly as useless as marriage vows,
these of the trysting-place, I fancy. You hold up your hands in horror
at this, not because you disagree, but because of my audacity in
applying general modernisms to myself. Well, I am tired of people who
pose as advanced thinkers and remain as conventional as ever. We have
outgrown so much of the sentimentalism of Love that muddle-headed
moderns imagine that we have outgrown Love itself. The keynote of
everything worthy in modern life and art and philosophy is--restraint.
I decline to regard ranting as eloquence because the Elizabethan
ranted well, and I decline also to accept the Shakesperian conception
of Love, viz., physical satiety, as the very latest thing in ideals.
Restraint, then! A marriage is doubtless, as Chesterton so admirably
puts it, a passionate compromise, but it does not follow that love is
therefore a compromising debauchery. It may be that I, who have my
ways far from feminine influence, tend to place women in a rarer and
purer atmosphere than most of them breathe, and that this tendency
unfits me for judging them accurately. Let it be so. Let my Welsh
Divinity watch me from beyond the dust-clouds of learning with her
grey eyes, while I pray never to lose my reverence for the quiet
loveliness of which she is, so unconsciously, the type.