te parties and
personalities, as it were dissolving some public or private uproar into
drama by Corneille or by Racine; and men who have hated each other must
sometimes have been reconciled, because each heard his enemy's argument
put into better words than he himself had found for his own; and this gift
was in later years to give him political influence, and win him respect
from Irish Nationalist and Unionist alike. It was, perhaps, because of it,
joined to a too literal acceptance of those noble images of moral
tradition which are so like late Graeco-Roman statues, that he had seen
all human life as a mythological system, where, though all cats are
griffins, the more dangerous griffins are only found among politicians he
has not spoken to, or among authors he has but glanced at; while those men
and women who bring him their confessions and listen to his advice, carry
but the snowiest of swan's plumage. Nor has it failed to make him, as I
think, a bad literary critic; demanding plays and poems where the
characters must attain a stature of seven feet, and resenting as something
perverse and morbid all abatement from that measure. I sometimes wonder
what he would have been had he not met in early life the poetry of Emerson
and Walt Whitman, writers who have begun to seem superficial precisely
because they lack the Vision of evil; and those translations of the
Upanishads, which it is so much harder to study by the sinking flame of
Indian tradition than by the serviceable lamp of Emerson and Walt Whitman.

We are never satisfied with the maturity of those whom we have admired in
boyhood; and, because we have seen their whole circle--even the most
successful life is but a segment--we remain to the end their harshest
critics. One old schoolfellow of mine will never believe that I have
fulfilled the promise of some rough unscannable verses that I wrote before
I was eighteen. Does any imaginative man find in maturity the admiration
that his first half-articulate years aroused in some little circle; and is
not the first success the greatest? Certainly, I demanded of Russell some
impossible things, and if I had any influence upon him--and I have little
doubt that I had, for we were very intimate--it may not have been a good
influence for I thought there could be no aim for poet or artist except
expression of a "Unity of Being" like that of a "perfectly proportioned
human body"--though I would not at the time have used that phrase.