He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.'


They were the lines which that noble Queen of Prussia, whom
Napoleon treated with such coarse brutality, used to quote in her
humiliation and exile; they were the lines my mother often quoted
in the troubles of her later life. I absolutely declined to accept
or admit the enormous truth hidden in them. I could not understand
it. I remember quite well how I used to tell her that I did not
want to eat my bread in sorrow, or to pass any night weeping and
watching for a more bitter dawn.

I had no idea that it was one of the special things that the Fates
had in store for me: that for a whole year of my life, indeed, I
was to do little else. But so has my portion been meted out to me;
and during the last few months I have, after terrible difficulties
and struggles, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden
in the heart of pain. Clergymen and people who use phrases without
wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a
revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One
approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What
one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually
and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and
absolute intensity of apprehension.

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is
capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the
artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul
and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is
expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of such modes of