Your present imprisonment is not necessarily a life sentence; but your satisfaction in it—­your acceptance of the routine of your treadmill—­is chilling to the hopes of those who have waited upon your progress; and it imperils your future—­as well as that hope we have in the humanities that are to be implanted in the minds of the young people you are to instruct.  We would not have you remain under the misapprehension that Truth alone can ever serve humanity—­Truth remains sterile until it is married to Goodness.  That marriage is consummated in the high flight of the imagination, and its progeny is of beauty.

You need beauty—­you need verse and color and music—­you need all the escapes—­all the doors wide open—­and this seemingly impertinent letter is merely the appeal of one human creature to another, for the sake of all the human creatures whom you have it in your power to endow with chains or with wings.

     Very sincerely yours,
        BRUCE PORTER.

     MY DEAR BRUCE PORTER,—­

My present impatient attitude towards a mystic being without doubt has been influenced by some impression of my childhood, but not the terror-bringing creatures you suggest.  My family was one of the last three which clung to a dying church in my country town.  I, though a boy of twelve, passed the plate for two years while the minister’s daughter sang a solo.  Our village was not a happy one, and the incongruity of our emotional prayers and ecstasies of imagery, and the drifting dullness and meanness of the life outside, filtered in some way into my boy mind.  I saw that suffering was real and pressing, and so many suffered resignedly; and that imagery and my companionship with a God (I was highly “religious” then) worked in a self-centred circle.  I never strayed from the deadly taint of some gentle form of egotism.  I was then truly in a “vault.”  I did things for a system of ethics, not because of a fine rush of social brotherly intuition.  My imagination was ever concerned with me and my prospects, my salvation.  I honestly and soberly believe that your “high window of the imagination” works out in our world as such a force for egotism; it is a self-captivating thing, it divorces man from the plain and bitter realities of life, it brings an anti-social emancipation to him.  I can sincerely make this terrible charge against the modern world, and that is, that it is its bent towards mysticism, its blinding itself through hysteria, which makes possible in its civilization its desperate inequalities of life-expression, its tortured children, its unhappy men and women, its wasted potentiality.  We have not been humble and asked what is man; we have not allowed ourselves to weigh sorrow.  It is in such a use that our powers of imagination could be brotherly.  We look on high in ecstasy, and fail to be on flame because ’of the suffering of those whose wounds are bare to our eyes on the street.