the idea that a quite honest man might be secret from a pure love
of secrecy, of solitary self-control. I went out of that garden with a
blurred sensation of the million possibilities of creative literature.
The feeling increased as my way fell back into the wood; for a wood
is a palace with a million corridors that cross each other everywhere.
I really had the feeling that I had seen the creative quality;
which is supernatural. I had seen what Virgil calls the Old Man
of the Forest: I had seen an elf. The trees thronged behind my path;
I have never seen him again; and now I shall not see him,
because he died last Tuesday.


XXII

The Orthodox Barber

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert
that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them;
and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it. There is a very real
thing which may be called the love of humanity; in our time it
exists almost entirely among what are called uneducated people;
and it does not exist at all among the people who talk about it.

A positive pleasure in being in the presence of any other human being
is chiefly remarkable, for instance, in the masses on Bank Holiday;
that is why they are so much nearer Heaven (despite appearances)
than any other part of our population.

I remember seeing a crowd of factory girls getting into an empty
train at a wayside country station. There were about twenty of them;