quarrelling in the cave would not have amused him, if something in his
nature had not looked out on most disputes, even those wherein he himself
took sides, with a mischievous wisdom. He told me once that when he lived
in some peasant's house, he tried to make those about him forget that he
was there, and it is certain that he was silent in any crowded room. It
is possible that low vitality helped him to be observant and
contemplative, and made him dislike, even in solitude, those thoughts
which unite us to others, much as we all dislike, when fatigue or illness
has sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, the
fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture which has
been made to impress the crowd. What blindness did for Homer, lameness
for Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you will, bad health did for him
by making him ask no more of life than that it should keep him living,
and above all perhaps by concentrating his imagination upon one thought,
health itself. I think that all noble things are the result of warfare;
great nations and classes, of warfare in the visible world, great poetry
and philosophy, of invisible warfare, the division of a mind within
itself, a victory, the sacrifice of a man to himself. I am certain that
my friend's noble art, so full of passion and heroic beauty, is the
victory of a man who in poverty and sickness created from the delight of
expression, and in the contemplation that is born of the minute and
delicate arrangement of images, happiness, and health of mind. Some early
poems have a morbid melancholy, and he himself spoke of early work he had
destroyed as morbid, for as yet the craftmanship was not fine enough to
bring the artist's joy which is of one substance with that of sanctity.
In one poem he waits at some street corner for a friend, a woman perhaps,
and while he waits and gradually understands that nobody is coming, sees
two funerals and shivers at the future; and in another written on his
25th birthday, he wonders if the 25 years to come shall be as evil as
those gone by. Later on, he can see himself as but a part of the