— 3 —
only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo,
who cares for anything I do? And what do I care?
I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him: endways, sideways, frontways and all the other ways — but he doesn't exist! Neither does she. I do, in a bastardly sort of way.
To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination.
In fact to return upon my theme for the time nearly all writing, up to the present, if not all art, has been especially designed to keep up the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which dis- tracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment. It has been always a search for „ the beautiful illusion ". Very well. I am not in search of „ the beautiful illusion ".
And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed — To the imagination — you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply : To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force — the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see.
In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so
