watchful, before which the illustrative violence, the extremes of tenderness and sweetness, bud and increase and burst, incredibly primitive and bright.
Once more, beauty is not featureless. By these means of style it has boundaries, differentiating figure and surface and scent: "By the centurion's hard fire there was another arrangement of life like a base scale played firmly." To see and exist, and to see exist: the appetite of a race of navigators, with large stone eyes:
"There were little pieces of meat classified and no carcasses. The poor like thick gold watch-chains, and little earrings stuck on cards." . . . "Into a city of charwomen. They climbed out of deep areas. Soon he saw they were everywhere, descending, rising, in their rhythm; young in glazed cotton furs, mature and very pregnant, old with scum in their eyes." . . . "Rain began. Wetted at dusk, the streets' patina of filth gleamed like stale fish, and out of the crests of the houses came noises of weeping that never was, never could be comforted."
Beyond these collected slums, England "hammered by the sea," its "naked sun" and "grey, savage grass" and "cows, that sharpen their teeth on their sides"; the Holy Land's "pool of hot wood," its "grey tent and its gilt bird"; France full of trenches, and Greece—a world heavy with characteristics.
Now that religion has been broken which lay embedded in faith, the shivered emotion attaches again in crystals to objects: a kind of awe and apprehension of meaning. This moody haughty mind, essentially religious, collects no drawing-room symbols; but gathers exactly the sense of ploughs, blades, and blood. It is rich in the scholarship of a golden bough, of a stamen of wood twelve feet long hung with a fox-pelt and feathers, of a dark grail. Strictly contemporary experience is lit by an antique fiery light; life an "infernal saga . . . coming up-to-date." The racial memory, the animal memory, has been strangely extended; and memory is the identifiable soul.
