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One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.
Do they care about Literature and Art? That is most important when you come to think of it. Literature and Art. Most important.
The affections are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle.
Her idea of business—"Henry, why do people who have enough money try to get more money?" Her idea of politics—"I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars,"
Is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be bequeathed at all? Has the soul offspring? A wych–elm tree, a vine, a wisp of hay with dew on it—can passion for such things be transmitted where there is no bond of blood?
When we think the dead both treacherous and absurd, we have gone far towards reconciling ourselves to their departure.
Charles and his father sometimes disagreed. But they always parted with an increased regard for one another, and each desired no doughtier comrade when it was necessary to voyage for a little past the emotions.
It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die—neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union.
She saw a little more clearly than hitherto what a human being is, and to what he may aspire. Truer relationships gleamed. Perhaps the last word would be hope—hope even on this side of the grave.
Once past the rocks of emotion, they knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their hands were on all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness and she valued grit enormously. They led a life that she could not attain to—the outer life of "telegrams and anger," which had detonated when Helen and Paul had touched in June, and had detonated again the other week. To Margaret this life was to remain a real force. She could not despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have
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"Don’t brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It’s true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them."
the idea that Mr. Wilcox loved, obsessed her before she came to love him in return.
Perhaps he could not have told, for his mental states became obscure as soon as he had passed through them.
She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
Nor was the message difficult to give. It need not take the form of a good "talking." By quiet indications the bridge would be built and span their lives with beauty.
"My motto is Concentrate. I’ve no intention of frittering away my strength on that sort of thing.""It isn’t frittering away the strength," she protested. "It’s enlarging the space in which you may be strong." He answered: "You’re a clever little woman, but my motto’s Concentrate." And this morning he concentrated with a vengeance.
"You mean to keep proportion, and that’s heroic, it’s Greek, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t succeed with you. Go on and fight with him and help him.
Their message was not of eternity, but of hope on this side of the grave. As she stood in the one, gazing at the other, truer relationship had gleamed.
she connected, though the connection might be bitter,
she felt their whole journey from London had been unreal. They had no part with the earth and its emotions. They were dust, and a stink, and cosmopolitan chatter, and the girl whose cat had been killed had lived more deeply than they.
Her surface could always respond to his without contempt, though all her deeper being might be yearning to help him. She had abandoned any plan of action. Love is the best, and the more she let herself love him, the more chance was there that he would set his soul in order.
She loved him with too clear a vision to fear his cloudiness.
Whether he droned trivialities, as to–day, or sprang kisses on her in the twilight, she could pardon him, she could respond.
Why has not England a great mythology? our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our country–side have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here. It has stopped with the witches and the fairies. It cannot vivify one fraction of a summer field, or give names to half a dozen stars. England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature—for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
Here had lived an elder race, to which we look back with disquietude. The country which we visit at week–ends was really a home to it, and the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields. All was not sadness. The sun was shining without. The thrush sang his two syllables on the budding guelder–rose. Some children were playing uproariously in heaps of golden straw. It was the presence of sadness at all that surprised Margaret, and ended by giving her a feeling of completeness. In these English farms, if
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"You shall see the connection if it kills you,
You can’t recognise them, because you cannot connect.
No one has ever told what you are—muddled, criminally muddled. Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don’t repent.
Remorse is not among the eternal
Here men had been up since dawn. Their hours were ruled, not by a London office, but by the movements of the crops and the sun. That they were men of the finest type only the sentimentalists can declare. But they kept to the life of daylight. They are England’s hope. Clumsily they carry forward the torch of the sun, until such time as the nation sees fit to take it up. Half clodhopper, half board–school prig, they can still throw back to a nobler stock, and breed yeomen.
But the Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled, the earth that he inherits will be grey.
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him—that
Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us, and strengthen the wings of love. They can beckon; it is not certain that they will, for they are not love’s servants. But they can beckon, and the knowledge of this incredible truth comforted him.
sine qua non."
In this jangle of causes and effects what had become of their true selves?
As a prisoner looks up and sees stars beckoning, so she, from the turmoil and horror of those days, caught glimpses of the diviner wheels.
Science explained people, but could not understand them.
they wanted everything down in black and white, and black and white was exactly what they were left with.
Though he would build up his life without hers, she could not apologise. He had refused to connect, on the clearest issue that can be laid before a man, and their love must take the consequences.
Differences, eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey.
I feel that our house is the future as well as the past."
There was something uncanny in her triumph. She, who had never expected to conquer anyone, had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives.
