because they were rather interested in than dependent
upon personal emotion, and because practical life,
as the years went on—the life of causes,
and movements, and organisations, and ideas, and investigations—tended
to absorb the energies of men; and that they found
their emotional life in home ties; and that the man
who lived for emotional relations would tend to be
thought, if not to be, a sentimentalist; but that
the real secret lay with women, and with men of perhaps
a feminine fibre. And all this was transfused
by a kind of tender pity, without any touch of complacency
or superiority, such as a mother might have for the
whispered hopes of a child who is lost in tiny material
dreams. But I gathered that there was a region
in which the heart could be entirely absorbed in a
deep and beautiful admiration for some other soul,
and rejoice whole-heartedly in its nobleness and greatness;
so that no question of gaining anything, or even of
being helped to anything, came in, any more than one
who has long been pent in shadow and gloom and illness,
and comes out for the first time into the sun, thinks
of any benefits that he may receive from the caressing
sunlight; he merely knows that it is joy and happiness
and life to be there, and to feel the warm light comfort
him and make him glad; and all this I had no difficulty
in understanding, for I knew the emotion that they
spoke of, though I called it by a different name.
I saw that it was love indeed, but love infinitely
purified, and with all the sense of possession that
mingles with masculine love subtracted from it; and
how such a relation might grow and increase, until
there arose a sort of secret and vital union of spirit,
more real indeed than time and space, so that, even
if this were divorced and sundered by absence, or
the clouded mind, or death itself, there could be
no shadow of doubt as to the permanence of the tie;
and a glance passed between the two as they spoke,
which made me feel like one who hears an organ rolling,
and voices rising in sweet harmonies inside some building,
locked and barred, which he may not enter. I
could not doubt that the music was there, while I
knew that for some dulness or belatedness I was myself
shut out; not, indeed, that I doubted of the truth
of what was said, but I was in the position of the
old saint who said that he believed, and prayed to
One to help his unbelief. For I saw that though
I projected the lines of my own experience infinitely,
adding loyalty to loyalty, and admiration to admiration,
it was all on a different plane. This interfusion
of personality, this vital union of soul, I could
not doubt it! but it made me feel my own essential
isolation still more deeply, as when the streaming
sunlight strikes warmth and glow out of the fire, revealing
crumbling ashes where a moment before had been a heart
of flame.
“Ah te meae si
partem animae rapit
Maturior vis,
quid moror altera?”—