detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had
made a new religion, almost an infallible church, out of poetic
tradition: a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of
emotions, a bundle of images and of masks passed on from
generation to generation by poets & painters with some help from
philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could
discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in
poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the
hangings that kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma:
'Because those imaginary people are created out of the deepest
instinct of man, to be his measure and his norm, whatever I can
imagine those mouths speaking may be the nearest I can go to
truth.' When I listened they seemed always to speak of one thing
only: they, their loves, every incident of their lives, were
steeped in the supernatural. Could even Titian's 'Ariosto' that I
loved beyond other portraits, have its grave look, as if waiting
for some perfect final event, if the painters, before Titian, had
not learned portraiture, while painting into the corner of
compositions, full of saints and Madonnas, their kneeling patrons?
At seventeen years old I was already an old-fashioned brass cannon
full of shot, and nothing kept me from going off but a doubt as to
my capacity to shoot straight.




III


I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by