imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting were not
utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practised them, the
law tottered--the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold
good. Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book
without warning you at any rate that his opinion was worthless.
No one is a better judge of literature than Rothenstein; but it
wouldn't have done to tell him so in those days; and I knew that
I must form an unaided judgment on `Negations.'

Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face
would have been for me in those days an impossible act of self-
denial. When I returned to Oxford for the Christmas Term I had
duly secured `Negations.' I used to keep it lying carelessly on
the table in my room, and whenever a friend took it up and
asked what it was about I would say `Oh, it's rather a
remarkable book. It's by a man whom I know.' Just `what it
was about' I never was able to say. Head or tail was just what I
hadn't made of that slim green volume. I found in the preface
no clue to the exiguous labyrinth of contents, and in that
labyrinth nothing to explain the preface.


`Lean near to life. Lean very near--nearer.

`Life is web, and therein nor warp nor woof is, but web only.

`It is for this I am Catholick in church and in thought, yet do let
swift Mood weave there what the shuttle of Mood wills.'