feel the difference in myself. But there is something larger,
stronger, deeper about Maud now, as if she had ascended into a purer
air, and caught sight of some unexpected, undreamed-of distance; but
instead of giving her remoteness, she seems to be sharing her wider
outlook with me; she was never a great talker--perhaps it was that in
old days my own mind ran like an ebullient fountain, evoking no
definite response, needing no interchange; but she was always a sayer
of penetrating things. She has a wonderful gift of seeing the firm
issue through a cloud of mixed suggestions; but of late there has been
a richness, a generosity, a wisdom about her which I have never
recognised before. I think, with contrition, that I under-estimated,
not her judgment or instinct, but her intellect. I am sure I lived too
much in the intellectual region, and did not guess how little it really
solves, in what a limited region it disports itself. I see that this
wisdom was hers all along, and that I have been blind to it; but now
that I have travelled out of the intellectual region, I perceive what a
much greater thing that further wisdom is than I had thought. Living in
art and for art, I used to believe that the intellectual structure was
the one thing that mattered, but now I perceive dimly that the mind is
but on the threshold of the soul, and that the artist may, nay does,
often perceive, by virtue of his trained perception, what is going on
in the sanctuary; but he is as one who kneels in a church at some great
solemnity--he sees the movements and gestures of the priests; he sees
the holy rite proceeding, he hears the sacred words; something of the
inner spirit of it all flows out to him; but the viewless current of
prayer, the fiery ray streaming down from God, that smites itself into
the earthly symbol--all this is hidden from him. Those priests, intent
upon the sacred work, feel something that they not only do not care to
express, but which they would not if they could; it would be a
profanation of the awful mystery. The artist is not profane in
expressing what he perceives, because he can be the interpreter of the
symbol to others more remote; but he is not a real partaker of the
mystery; he is a seer of the word and not a doer. What now amazes me is
that Maud, to whom the heart of the matter, the inner emotion, has
always been so real, could fling herself, and all for love of me, into
the outer work of intellectual expression. I ha