o coalesce,
conglomerate naturally, and to admit of some sort of setting, or
resetting. I say setting or resetting, because these thoughts, these
questionings, these discussions, though in their written shape merely
copied out from a confusion of quite heterogeneous notes, have nearly
all had, while they were living, while thought or asked or discussed,
a real setting of some sort. For the ideas have come mainly in the
presence of works of art, or in discussions with friends: they have
come, sometimes unperceived at the moment, together with the sight
of a picture, the hearing of a bar or two of music, the reading of
an accidentally met, familiar quotation; a reason, a long sought
explanation has been suddenly struck out by a sentence, a word from a
friend. Oh yes, a setting they have had, these ideas, such as they are:
a real, living, shimmering setting of tones and looks, and jests and
passion, and anecdote and illustration, and irrelevant streakings and
veinings of description and story; a setting too of place and time and
personality. For they have come out of real desultory talks: re-echoed
by the bare walls of glaring galleries and sounding statue cells; or
whispered on the steps before the withdrawn curtain of some altar-piece,
while the faint mass bell tinkled from distant chapels, or great waves
of litany responses rushed roaring down the nave, and broke in short
repeated echoes against the pillars of the aisle; or, never clearly
begun or ended, between one piece of music and another, with the hands
still on the keys, and the eyes still on the score; talks desultory,
digressive, broken off by the withdrawing of the curtain from a fresh
picture, by the prelude of another piece, by a cart blocking up the
street or a cat in behind a window grating; by something often utterly
trumpery, senseless and for the moment all important. And they have come
also, these scattered ideas, in long discussions, rambling but eager
(their seriousness shivered ever and anon by a sudden grotesque image or
cutting answer, or inane pun, or diverted off, no one knew how, into
anecdotes or folk tales), in the fire-lit winter afternoons, with the
crackle of wood and the crackling of sparks; or, in the August-heated,
shuttered room, with the midday drowsy silence brought home more
completely by the never flagging saw of the cicalas on the vine-bearing
poplars, by the uniform clatter of the wooden frame crushing the brittle
silvery hemp stra