nt her," he wrote, "if I denied myself any of the pain I
could not believe in my own ecstasy." We must not make a false faith by
hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest
achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and
therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by
hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can
create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable
pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be
rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not
find him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being
but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not
impossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can never
be a portion of our being, "Soon got, soon gone," as the proverb says. I
shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I
have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen
of the soul a passing bell.

The last knowledge has often come most quickly to turbulent men, and for a
season brought new turbulence. When life puts away her conjuring tricks
one by one, those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the
sensual kiss, for our Chambers of Commerce and of Commons have not the
divine architecture of the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened by the
sun. The poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives
amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon.

VI

I think the Christian saint and hero, instead of being merely
dissatisfied, make deliberate sacrifice. I remember reading once an
autobiography of a man who had made a daring journey in disguise to
Russian exiles in Siberia, and his telling how, very timid as a child, he
schooled himself by wandering at night through dangerous streets. Saint
and hero cannot be content to pass at moments to that hollow image and
after become their heterogeneous selves, but would always, if they could,
resemble the antithetical self. There is a shadow of type on type, for in
all great poetical styles there is saint or hero, but when it is all over
Dante can return to his chambering and Shakespeare to his "pottle pot."
They sought no impossible perfection but when they handled paper or
parchment. So too will saint or hero, because he works in his own flesh