The other night, tired, I fell asleep on my sofa. I dreamed that a beautiful spirit was standing beside me. He said: “My Brother, I have come to give you the supreme gift that will heal you and save you.” I answered eagerly: “Give it me—what is it?” And the fair radiant spirit smiled with beautiful solemn eyes, and blew a breath into the tangled garden of my heart—and when I looked there I saw the tall white Flower of Sorrow growing in the Sunlight.”
(To E. A. S.)
St. Margaret’s Bay,
May, 1898.
I have had a very happy and peaceful afternoon. The isolation, with sun and wind, were together like soft cream upon my nerves: and I suppose that within twenty minutes after I left the station I was not only serenely at peace with the world in general, but had not a perturbing thought. To be alone, alone ‘in the open’ above all, is not merely healing to me but an imperative necessity of my life—and the chief counter agent to the sap that almost every person exercises on me, unless obviated by frequent and radical interruption.
By the time I had passed through the village I was already ‘remote’ in dreams and thoughts and poignant outer enjoyment of the lovely actualities of sun and wind and the green life: and when I came to my favourite coign where, sheltered from the bite of the wind, I could overlook the sea (a mass of lovely, radiant, amethyst-shadowed, foam-swept water), I lay down for two restful happy hours in which not once a thought of London or of any one in it, or of any one living, came to me. This power of living absolutely in the moment is worth not only a crown and all that a crown could give, but is the secret of youth, the secret of life.
O how weary I am of the endless recurrence of the ordinary in the lives of most people—the beloved routine, the cherished monotonies, the treasured certainties. I grudge them to none: they seem incidental to the common weal: indeed they seem even made for happiness. But I know one wild heart at least to whom life must come otherwise, or not at all.
Today I took a little green leaf o’ thorn. I looked at the sun through it, and a dazzle came into my brain—and I wished, ah I wished I were a youth once more, and was ‘sun-brother’ and ‘star-brother’ again—to lie down at night, smelling the earth, and rise at dawn, smelling the new air out of the East, and know enough of men and cities to avoid both, and to consider little any gods ancient or modern, knowing well that there is only ‘The Red God’ to think of, he who lives and laughs in the red blood....
There is a fever of the ‘green life’ in my veins—below all the ordinary littlenesses of conventional life and all the common place of exterior: a fever that makes me ill at ease with people, even those I care for, that fills me with a weariness beyond words and a nostalgia for sweet impossible things.
This can be met in several ways—chiefly and best by the practical yoking of the imagination to the active mind—in a word, to work. If I can do this, well and good, either by forced absorption in contrary work (e. g. Cæsar of France), or by letting that go for the time and let the more creative instinct have free play: or by some radical change of environment: or again by some irresponsible and incalculable variation of work and brief day-absences.