Stricken they sat: and through them moved
My own dear lady, pale and sweet.
This soul whose clearness makes afraid
Our souls: this wholly guiltless one—
No cobweb doubts—no passion smoke
Have veiled this mirror from Thy sun.
In letters to Frances he could enter so deeply into her grief as to make it his own. But when he wrote verse and spoke as it were to himself or to God, the reflected emotion was not enough. These verses could never rank with his real poetry.
It was not possible in fact for a man so happily in love to dwell lastingly on any sorrow. And I cannot avoid the feeling that, quite apart from any theory, cheerfulness was constantly "breaking in." For Gilbert was a very happy man. Across the top of one of his letters is written: "You can always tell the real love from the slight by the fact that the latter weakens at the moment of success; the former is quadrupled."
The next of his letters is a mingling of the comic and the fantastic, very special to G.K.C.
11, Paternoster Buildings (postmarked Sept. 29, 1899.)
. . . I fear, as you say, that my letters do not contain many practical details about myself: the letters are not very long to begin with, as I think it better to write something every day than a long letter when I have leisure: and when I have a little time to think in, I always think of the Kosmos first and the Ego afterwards. I admit, however, that you are not engaged to the Kosmos: dear me! what a time the Kosmos would have! All its Comets would have their hair brushed every morning. The Whirlwind would be adjured not to walk about when it was talking. The Oceans would be warmed with hot-water pipes. Not even the lowest forms of life would escape the crusade of tidiness: you would walk round and round the jellyfish, looking for a place to put in shirt-links.
Under these circumstances, then, I cannot but regard it as fortunate that you are only engaged to your obedient Microcosm: a biped inheriting some of the traits of his mother, the Kosmos, its untidiness, its largeness, its irritating imperfection and its profound and hearty intention to go on existing as long as it possibly can.
I can understand what you mean about wanting details about me, for I want just the same about you. You need only tell me "I went down the street to a pillar-box," I shall know that you did it in a manner, blindingly, staggeringly, crazily beautiful. It is quite true, as you say, that I am a person wearing certain clothes with a certain kind of hair. I cannot get rid of the impression that there is something scorchingly sarcastic about the underlining in this passage. . . .
. . . as to what I do every day: it depends on which way you want it narrated: what we all say it is, or what it really is.