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 of "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 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.


These were the opening phrases of the preface, but those which