.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and
callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike
pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between
the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the
resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to
the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than
it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the
moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing
with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made
incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no
truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to
be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the
appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow
have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there
is pain.

More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary
reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic
relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single
wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in
symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is
suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to
live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that
we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not
merely for a 'month or twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years
to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be
starving the soul.

I remember talking once on this subject to one of the most beautiful
personalities I have ever known: a woman, whose sympathy and noble
kindness to me, both before and since the tragedy of my imprisonment,
have been beyond power and description; one who has really assisted me,
though she does not know it, to bear the burden of my troubles more than
any one else in the whole world has, and all through the mere fact of her
existence, through her being what she is--partly an ideal and partly an
influence: a suggestion of what one might become as well as a real help
towards becoming it; a soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes
what is spiritual seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea: one
for whom beauty and sor