he has seen all human life as a mythological system, where, though all cats are griffins, the more dangerous griffins are only to be found among politicians he has not spoken to, or among authors he has but glanced at; while those men and women who bring him their confessions and listen to his advice carry but the snowiest of swan's plumage. Nor has it failed to make him, as I think, a bad literary critic; demanding plays and poems where the characters must attain a stature of seven feet, and resenting as something perverse and morbid all abatement from that measure. I sometimes wonder what he would have been had he not met in early life the poetry of Emerson and Walt Whitman, writers who have begun to seem superficial precisely because they lack the vision of evil; and those translations of the Upanishads, which it is so much harder to study by the sinking flame of Indian tradition than by the serviceable lamp of Emerson and Walt Whitman.
We are never satisfied with the maturity of those whom we have admired in boyhood; and, because we have seen their whole circle—even the most successful life is but a segment—we remain to the end their harshest critic. One old schoolfellow of mine will never believe that I have fulfilled the promise of some rough unscannable verses that I wrote before I was eighteen. Does any imaginative man find in maturity the admiration that his first half-articulate years aroused in some little circle; and is not the first success the greatest? Certainly I demanded of Russell some impossible things, and if I had any influence upon him—and I have little doubt that I had, for we were very intimate—it may not have been a good influence, for I thought there could be no aim for poet or artist except expression of a "Unity of Being" like that of a "perfectly proportioned human body"—though I would not at the time have used that phrase. I remember that I was ironic and indignant when he left the Art Schools, because his "will was weak, and must grow weaker if he followed any emotional pursuit"; as, later, when he let the readers of a magazine decide between his prose and his verse. I now know that there are men who cannot possess "unity of being," who must not seek it or express it—and who, so far from seeking an anti-self, a mask that delineates a being in all things the opposite to their natural self, can but seek the suppression of the anti-self, till the natural self alone remains. These are those who must seek no image of desire, but await that which lies beyond their mind, unities not of the mind, but unities of nature,
