byatt-a-s- possession-a-romance

Chapter 10

THE CORRESPONDENCE

Dear Miss LaMotte,

I do not know whether to be more encouraged or cast down by your letter. The essential point in itis "ifyou care to write again, "for by that permission you encourage me more than by your wish not to be seen - which I must respect - you cast me down. And you send a poem, and observe wisely that poems are worth all the cucumber-sandwiches in the world. Sothey are indeed - and yours most particularly - but you may imagine the perversity of the poetic imagination and its desire to feed on imagined cucumber-sandwiches, which, since they are positively not to be had, it pictures to itself as a form of English manna- oh the perfect green circles - oh the delicate hint of salt - oh the fresh pale butter - oh, above all, the soft white crumbs and golden crust of the new bread - and thus, as in all aspects of life, the indefatigable fancy idealises what could be snapped up and swallowed in a moment's restrained greed, in sober fact.

But you must know that I am happy toforgo the sandwiches, dreamed or soberly chewed, for your delightful poem - which, as you say, has a note of savagery proper to the habits of true spiders asthey have lately been observed. Do you wish to extend your metaphor of entrapment or enticement to Art? I have read other of your poems of Insect Life, and marvelled at the way they combined the brilliance and fragility of those winged things - or creeping - with something too of the biting and snapping and devouring that may be seen under a microscope. It would be a brave poet indeed who would undertake a true description of the Queen Bee - or Wasp - or Ant - as we now know them to be - havingfor centuries supposedthese centres of commu nal worship and activity to be Male Rulers -I somehow imagine you do not share your Sex's revulsion at such life-forms - or what I imagine to be a common revulsion -

I have in my head a kind of project of a long poem on insect life of my own. Not lyric, like yours, but a dramatised monologue such as those I have already written on Mesmer or Alexander Selkirk or Neighbour Pliable -I do not know if you know these poems and shall be glad to send them to you if you do not. I find I am at ease with other imagined minds - bringing to life, restoring in some sense to vitality, the whole vanished men of other times, hair, teeth, fingernails, porringer, bench, wineskin, church, temple, synagogue and the incessant weaving labour of the marvellous brain inside the skull - making its patterns, its most particular sense of what it sees and learns and believes. It seems important thatthese other lives of mineshould span manycenturies and as many places as my limited imagination can touch. For all I am is a nineteenth-century gentleman plumb in the midst ofsmoky London - and what is peculiar to him is to know just how much stretches away from his vanishing pin-point of observation - before and around and after - whilst all the time he is what he is, with his whiskered visage and his shelvesfull of Plato and Feuerbach, St Augustine andfohn Stuart Mill.

I run on, and have not communicated to you the subjectof my insect-poem, which is to be the short and miraculous - and on the whole tragic - life of Swammerdam, who discovered in Holland the optic glass which revealed to us the endless reaches and ceaseless turmoil of the infinitely small just as the great Galileo turned his optic tube on the majestic motions of the planets and beyond them the silent spheres of the infinitely great. Are you ac quainted with his story? May I send you my version when I have workedit out? If it comestogood? (As I know it will, for it is sofull of tiny particularfacts and objects in the observation of which the animation of the human mind inheres - and you will ask - my mind or his? - and I do not know, to tell the truth. He invented marvellous tiny instruments for peering and prying into the essence of insect life, and all made of fine ivory, as less destructive and harmful than harsh metal - Lilliputian needles he made, before Lilliput was thought of-faery needles. And I have merely words - and the dead husks of other men's words - but I shall bring it off- - you need not believe me yet, but you shall see.)

Now - you say I may have an essay on the Everlasting Nay - or on Schleiermacher's Veil of Illusion or the Milk of Paradise - or what I will. Whatprodigality - how am I to chuse? I think I will not have the Everlast ing Nay, but remain still in hope of eventual cool green circles - to go with the Milk of Paradise and a modicum of Bohea - and I want from you not illusion but truth. So perhaps you will tell me more about your Fairy Project - if it may be spoken of without hurting your thinking - There are times when to speak - or to write - is helpful, and times when it is most nugatory - if you would rather not pursue our conversation I shall under stand. But I hopefor a letter in answer to all my rambling nonsense - which I hope has given no offence to one I hope to know better.

Yours very truly

R. H. Ash

Dear Mr Ash,

I am ashamed to think that what you may reasonably have taken for coyness - or even churlishness - in myself should have produced such a generous and sparkling mixture of wit and information from you. Thank you. If all persons to whom I refused mere vegetable aliment were so to regale me with intellectual nourishment I should remain obdurate in the matter of sandwiches till all eternity - but most petitioners are contentwith one denial - And that is truly for the best, for we live so very quietly, we two solitary ladies, and run our little household - we have our sweet daily rhythms which are not disturbed, and our circumscribed littleindependence - on account of being wholly unremarkable- your delicacy will see how it is -I speak soberlyfor once - we neither call nor receive callers - we met, you and I, because Crabb Robinson was afriend of my dearfather - as whose friend was he not? I did not feel it in my power to refuse a request in that name- and yet I was sorry - for I do not go out into society - the lady protests too much, you will say - but she was moved by your green circular visions of contentment, and did wish, briefly, that it was in her power to give a more satisfactory answer. But it would have been regretted, it would - not only by me, but also by yourself.

I was greatly flattered by your good opinion of my little poem. I am uncertain as to how to answer your question on entrapment or enticement as qualitiesof Art - ofAriachne's art they may be - and by extension of merely fragile or glistening female productions - but not surely of your own great works. I was quite shockedthat you might suppose I did not know the Poem on Mesmer - or that on Selkirk on his terrible island, face to face with an unrelenting Sun and an apparently unresponsive Creator - or that too on Neighboour Pliable, and his religious versatility or tergiversations. I should have told a small Fib - and said I knew them not - for thegrace ofreceiving them at their Author's hands - but one must keep truth - in small things as in great - and this was no small thing. You are to know that we have all your volumes, ranged forbiddingly side by side - and that they are often opened and often discussed in this little house as in the great world.

You are to know too - or maybe you are not - how should I say this, to you with whom my acquaintance is so recent - and yet if not to you, to whom- and I have just written, one must keep truth, and this is so central a truth - you are to know then, after all, for I must take my courage in my hands - that your great poem Ragnarôk was the occasion of quite the worst crisis in the life of my simple religious faith, that I have ever experienced, or hope to experience. It was not that anywhere in that poem you attacked the Christian religion - which indeed was not made mention of with complete Poetic Propriety - and moreover you speak never, in your poetry, withyour own voice,orfrom your own heart directly. (Thatyou question isclear - the creator of Pliable, of Lazarus, of the heretic Pelagius is as wise as the serpent about all the most subtle and searching questionings andprobings of the Grounds of our Belief that in our time have been most persistently and unremittingly explored. You know the "ambages and sinuosities" of the Critical Philosophy, as your Augustine says of your Pelage - for whom I have a weakness, for was he not a Breton, as I in part am, and did he not wish sinful men and women to be nobler andfreer than they were?…) I digress wildlyfrom Ragnarôk and its pagan Day of Judgment and its pagan interpretation of the mystery of the Resurrection, and the New Heaven and the New Earth. It seemed to me you were saying "Such Tales men tell and have told - they do not differ, save in emphasis, here and there." Or even "Men tell what they Desire shall be or might be, not what it is divinely, transcendentlydecreed Must Be and Is. " It seemed to me you made Holy Scripture no morethan another Wonder Tale - bydint of such writing, such force of imagining. I confuse myself, I shall not go on, I ask your pardon if what I have said appears incomprehensible to you. I doubted and I admitted Doubts I have had to live with since. Enough of that.

I did not mean to write all this. Can you doubt that I shall be delighted to receiveyour Swammerdam- if as you come to the end of it, you should still have an inclination to make a copy and send it here. -I cannot promise intelligent criticism- but you cannot be in need of that - a receptive and a Thoughtful reading you are assured of. I was most interested in what you tell me of his discovery of the microscope - and his ivory needlesfor examining the minuter Forms of Life. We in this house have done a little work with microscopes and glasses - but We have a very womanly reluctance to take life - you will find no pinned and chloroformed collection Here - only a few upturnedJars housing temporary guests - a largeHouse-spider - and a Moth in chrysalisform - a voracious Worm with many legs which we have been wholly unable to identify and which is Possessed of a Restless Demon - or hatred ofJar-panopticons.

I send two more Poems. Theyform part of a series on Psyche - in modern form - that poor doubting Girl - who took Heavenly Love for a Serpent.

I have not answered yr question about my Fairy Poem. I am deeply flattered - and no less deeply alarmed - that you remember it so - -for I spoke - or affected to speak - idly on the matter, as about something which might be pleasant to Toy with - or pretty to investigate - one of these unoccupied days -

Whereas in verity -I have it in my head to write an epic - or if not an epic, still a Saga or Lay or great mythical Poem - and how can a poor breathless woman with no staying-power and only a Lunar Learning confess such an ambition to the authorof the Ragnarôk? But I have the most curious certaintythat you are to be trusted in this matter - that you will not mock - nor deluge the fairy of the fountain with Cold Water.

Enough. The Poems are enclosed. I have many more on the subject of metamorphosis - one of the problems of our time - and all Times, rightly known. Dear Sir - forgive my excitedprolixity - and send, when you may, if you will, your Swammerdam to edify

Your sincere well-wisher

C. LaMotte

[Enclosed] METAMORPHOSIS

Does the ruffled Silken Flyer

Pause to recall how She-began

Her soft cramped crawling Origins-

Does man

In all his puffed and sparking Glory

Cast back a Thought

To the Speck of Flesh the Story

Began with, from Naught?

But both, in their Creator's terrible keen sight

Lay curled and known through timeless Day and Night

He Form and Life at once and always-Gave

Is still their Animator and their Grave-

PSYCHE

In ancient Tales-the Creatures-helpful were

To taxed and fearful Humans in despair.

The World was One for those Men, which now is

A dissonant Congeries.

The Nation of the Spinster Ants

Their help to sorrowing Psyche brought

Whom cruel Venus set to sort

The mingled grains and seeds of plants.

They brought their feeling Sympathy

To human Task and Trouble.

They brought their Social Huswifery

To Venus-taunting-Muddle-

They sorted-cleaned-and ordered

What lay in-feckless-Heap

That Psyche-all incapable-

Her tryst-with Love-might keep.

Think not-that Man's Approval

Anticipated Kiss

Is Guerdon of our Merit

Or Order's Warrant-Is

The Ants toil for no Master

Sufficient to their Need

The daily commerce of the Nest

The storage of their Seed

They meet-and exchange Messages-

But none to none-bows down

They-like God's thoughts-speak each to each-

Without-external-crown.

Dear Miss LaMotte,

How generous of you, after all, to write so promptly and so fully. I hope my answer is not too precipitate -I would not for the world harass you importunately - but there was so much of interest in what you said that I should like to set my thoughts down whilst they are fresh and clear. Your poems are delightful and original - if we were face to face I should hazard a guess or two at the deeper reaches of riddling allegory in the Psyche- which I have not the courage or effrontery to set down in black and white. You begin so meekly, with your cast-down princess and useful creatures - and end quite the opposite, with a moral dispensation - -from what? is the difficulty - -from monarchy - or the Love of Man - or Eros as opposed to Agape - or the malignity of Venus? Is the social affection of the anthill truly a better thing than the love of men and women? Well, you are to be thejudge - the poem is yours and afine one - and there is enough evidence in human history of topless towers set onfire for apassionate whim - or poor souls enslaved by loveless unions imposed by parental will and the dictates of lineage - or friends slaying each other - Eros is a bad and fickle little godhead - and I have quite talked myself round to your way of thinking, Miss LaMotte, without still wholly knowing what that is.

Now I have given your poems the priority which is their due, I must tell you that I have been in somedistress to think that my poem had occasioned doubt in you. A securefaith - a true prayerfulness - is a beautiful and a true thing - however we must nowadays construeit - and not to be disturbed by the meanderings and queryings of the finite brain ofR. H. Ash or any other puzzled student of our Century. Ragnarôk was written in all honesty in the days when I did not myself question Biblical certainties - or the faith handed down by my fathers and theirs before them. It was read differently by some- the lady who was to become my wife was included in these readers - and I was at the time startled and surprisedthat my Poem should have been construed as any kind of infidelity - -for I meant it rather as a reassertion of the Universal Truth of the living presence of Allfather(under whatever Name) and of the hope of Resurrection from whatever whelming disaster in whatever form. When Odin, disguised as the Wanderer, Gan-grader, in my Poem, asks the Giant Wafthrudnir what was the word whispered by the Father of the gods in the ear of his dead son, Baldur, on hisfuneral pyre - the young man I was - most devoutly - meant the word to be -Resurrection. And he, that young poet, who is and is not myself, saw no difficulty in supposing that the dead Norse God of Light might prefigure - or figure - the dead Son of the God Who is the Father of Christendom. But, as you perceived, this is a two-handed engine, a slicing weapon that cuts both ways, this of figuration - to say that the Truth of the Tale is in the meaning, that the Tale but symbolises an eternal verity, is one step on the road to the parity of all tales… And the existence of the same Truths in all Religions is a great argument both for and against the paramount Truthfulness of One.

Now -I must make confession. I have written and destroyed an earlier answer to your letter in which -not disingenuously -I urged you to hold fast by yourfaith - not to involve yourself in the "ambages andsinuosities" of the Critical Philosophy - and wrote, what may not be nonsense, that women's minds, more intuitive and purer and less beset with torsions and stresses than those of mere males - may hold on to truths securely that we men may lose by much questioning, much of that mechanicalfutility; "A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender it" - this was the wise saying of Sir Thomas Browne - and I would not be instrumental in demanding the keys of that city from you in pursuit of a false claim.

But I thought - and I was right in thinking, was I not? - that you would not be best pleased to be exempted from argument by an appeal to your superior Intuition and an abandoning of the field by me?

I do not know why - or how - but I do know wholeheartedly that it is so - so I cannot prevaricate with you, and worse, cannot leave decently undiscussed matters of such import. So you will have remarked - you so sharply intelligent - that I have nowhere in this letter claimed that I now hold the simple or innocent views of the young Poet of Ragnarok. And if I tell you what views I do hold - what will you think of me? Will you continue to communicate your thoughts to me? I do not know -I only know that I am under some compulsion of truthfulness. I am not become any kind of an Atheist, nor yet positivist, at least,not as to the extreme religious position of those who make a religion out of Humanity - for although I wish myfellow men well, and find them endlessly interesting, yet there are more things in Heaven and Earth than were created for their, that is our, benefit. The impulses to religion might be the need to trust - or the capacity for wonder - and my own religious feelings have always been inspired more by the latter. I find it hard to shift without the Creator - the more we see and understand, the more amazement there is in this strangely interrelated Heap of things - which is yet not disordered. But I go toofast. And I cannot, I must not, burden you with a complete confession of what are in any case a very confused, very incoherent, indeed inchoate set of ideas, perceptions, half-truths, useful fictions, struggled for and not pos sessed.

The truth is - my dear Miss LaMotte - that we live in an old world - a tired world - a world thathas gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the brightDayspring ofhuman morning - by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos - are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision - as moulting serpents, before they burstforth with their new flexiblebrilliant skins, are blinded by the crusts of their old one - or, we might say, as the lovely lines of faith that sprung up in the aspiring towersof the ancient ministers and abbeys are both worn away by time and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress. Now, I cannot believe, being no Manichee, that He, the Creator, if he exists, did not make us and our world that which we are. He made us curious, did he not? - he made us questioning - and the Scribe of Genesis did well to locate the source of all our misery in thatgreed for knowledge which has also been our greatest spur - in some sense - to good. To good and evil. We have more of both those, I must believe, than our primitive parents.

Now, my great question is, has He withdrawn Himself/row our vision so that by diligence of our own matured minds we might find out His Ways - now sofar awayfrom us - or have we by sin, or by some necessary thickening of our skins before the new stages of the metamorphosis - have we reached some stage which necessitates our consciousness of our ignorance and distance - andis this necessity health or sickness?

I was in Ragnarôk- where Odin, the Almighty, becomes a mere wan dering Questioner in Middle-Earth - and is necessarily destroyed with all his works on the last battlefield at the end of the last terrible Winter -I was feeling towards some such question - unknowing -

And then there is the whole question of what kind of Truth may be conveyed in a wonder-tale, as you rightly named it - but I trespass terribly on your patience - which may by now be at an end with me -I may have put myself beyond the pale of your keen and discerning attention -

And I have not answeredwhat you said of your Epic. Well - if you still care for my views - as why should you? You are a Poet and in the end must care only for your own views - why not an Epic? Why not a mythic drama in twelve books? I can see no reason in Nature why a woman might not write such a poem as well as a man - if she but set her mind to it.

Does this sound brusque? It is because it distressesme that you should even - with your gifts - suppose an apology of any kind was neededfor the Project -

I am very well aware that an Apology is neededfor my tone throughout this letter, which I shall not re-read, for it is out of my power to recast it again. So it comes to you rough, unhouseled, unannealed - and I shall wait - resigned but anxious - to see if you feel any response is possible -

Yours,

R. H. Ash

Dear Mr Ash,

If I held Silence - too long - forgive me. I deliberated indeed not whether but what-I might Reply - since you do me the honour -I had almost writ, the painful honour - but indeed it is not - that is not so - of trusting me with your true opinions. I am no Miss in an evangelical novel to fly into a fine frenzy of -elevated- Rebuff or Rebuttal at expressions of honest doubt - and am partially in accord with you - Doubt, doubt is endemic to our life in this world at this time. I do not Dispute your vision of our historicalSituation - we are far from the Source of Light - and we know Things - that make a Simple Faith - hard to hold, hard tograsp, hard to wrestle.

You write much - of the Creator - whom you do not nameFather - save in yr Norse analogy. But of the true tale of the Son you say wondrous little - andyet that lies at the Centre of our livingfaith - the Life and Death of God made man, our true Friend and Saviour, the model of our conduct, and our hope, in his Rising from the Dead, of a future life for all of us, without which the failing and manifest injustice of our earthly span would be an intolerable mockery. But I write - like a Sermon-Preacher - which we Women are not - it is Decreed - -fitted to be - and tell you no morethan you must have endlessly - in your wisdom - already cogitated.

And yet - could we have conceived that Sublime Model, that Supreme Sacrifice - if it were not so?

I could adduce against you - the Evidence of your own Lazarus-poem - whose riddling title you must some day expound to me in its mystery. Déjà-Vu or the Second Sight- indeed. How are we to take that? My friend - my companion and I have lately become interested in psychic phenomena - we have attended some locallectures on unusual States of Mind - and Spirit manifestations - we have even been bold enough to sit in at a seance conducted by a Mrs Lees - Now Mrs Lees is convinced that the phenomena of Déjà-Vu- whereby the experient is convincedthat a present experience is only a Repetition of whathas already, perhaps frequently, been lived through before - is Evidence of some circularity of inhuman time - of Another Adjacent World where things eternally are with no change or decay. And that the well-attested Phenomena of Second Sight - the gift of pre-

Vision, or foretelling or prophecy - is another Dipping into thatforever refreshed Continuum. So - in this view yr poem wd seem to be suggesting that dead Lazarus moved in and out of Eternity again - 'from Time to Time" as you wrote in that poem - if I understand you - and now sees Time - -from the perspective of Eternity. It is a conceit worthy of you - and now I come to know you better - his risen vision of the miraculous Nature of the Minute Particulars of Life - the Goat's yellow barredEye - the bread on the Platter with the scaly Fishes waiting for the oven - all these are to you the essence of living,- and it is only to your perplexed narrator that the living-deadman's gaze appears Indifferent - for truly he sees all to have value -All-

Before I met Mrs Lees -I took your Second Sight more generally - as a Prefiguring of that Second Coming we await - little grains of sand shall be sifted and counted, as the hairs on our heads, in the eye of the deadman -

The Son of God speaks not in your poem. But the Roman Scribe who tells the tale - he the census-taker, the collector of minorfacts - is he not amazed despite his own inclinations - despite his Prosaic mental habits of officialdom - by the effect of thepresence of the Man on that small community of believers - who are cheerfully ready to Diefor Him - and as ready to live in penury -" 'tis all one to thee" he writes, puzzled - but we are not puzzled-for He has oped to them the Door of Eternity and they have glimpsed the light within - that illuminates the loaves andfishes - is not that so?

Or am I too Simple? Was He - so loved, so absent, so cruellydead - merely Man?

You have most dramatically presented the Love of Him, - the Need of his Comfort - now Absent - among the women of Lazarus' household - the ceaselessly active Martha and the visionary Mary, each in her way aware of what His Presence once meant - though Martha sees it as household decorum - and Mary sees it as Lost Light - and Lazarus sees - only what he sees - momently -

Oh what a puzzle. Now I come to the end of my clumsy apprentice adumbration of your masterly monologue - have I described the liveliness of Living Truth - or the dramatisation merely - of faith - of Need?

Will you say what you mean? Are you like the Apostle, all things to allmen? Where - where have I led - myself?Tell me - He Lives - -for you

Well, my dear Miss Lamotte, I am tied to the stake and I must stay the course - though in otherrespectsdissimilar enoughfrom Macbeth. I was first relieved to have your letter, and to see that I was notjudged excommunicado and then, on better judgment making, I weighed it for some time, turning it this way and that in case it should after all speak Brimstone and Ashes to me.

And when I came to open it, there was such generosity of spirit, such fervent faith and such subtlety of understanding of what I had written -I mean not only my dubious letter, but my poem on Lazarus. You know how it is, beingyourself apoet - one writes such and such a narrative, and thinks as one goes along - here's a good touch - this concept modifies that - will it not be too obvious to the generality? - too thick an impasto of the Obvious - one has almost a disgust at the too-apparent meaning - and then the general public gets hold of it, andpronounces it at the same time too heartily simple and too loftily incomprehensible - and it is clear only that whatever one had hoped to convey is lost in mists of impenetrability - and slowly it loses its life- in one's own mind, as much as in its readers'.

And then you comealong - with a dashof apparently effortless and casual wisdom - and resuscitate the whole thing - even to your own doubtful question at the end - did He do this - did Lazarus live - did He, the God-man, truly resurrect the dead before Himself triumphing over Death - or was it all only theproduct, asFeuerbachbelieves, of human Desire embodying itself in a Tale -?

You ask me - tell me - He Lives - for you -

Lives - yes - but How? How? Do I truly believe that this Man stept into the charnel house where Lazarus was already corrupt and bade him stand and walk?

Do I truly believe that all this is only figments of hopes and dreams and garbledfolklore, embellished for the credulous by simple people?

We live in an age of scientifichistory - we sift our evidence - we know somewhat about eyewitness accounts and how far it is prudent to entrust ourselvesto them - and of whatthis living-dead-man (I speak of Lazarus, not of his Saviour) saw, or reported or thought, or assured his loving family of what lay beyond the terrible bourn -not a word.

So if I construct a fictive eyewitness account - a credible plausible account - am I lending life to truth with my fiction - or verisimilitude to a colossalLie with my feverish imagination? Do I do as they did, the evangelists, reconstructing the events of the Story in after-time? Or do I do asfalse prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer - like Macbeth's witches - mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of apropheticBooh - telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledgedCali-ban -I nowhere claim my poor bullet-headed brute of a Roman censor as other than mine, a clay mouth to whistle through.

No answer, you will say, your head on one side, considering me, like a wise bird, sharply, and judging me as a prevaricator.

Do you know - the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination. Whatever the absolute Truth-or Untruth-of that old life-in death-Poetry can make that man live for the length of the faith you or any other choose to give to him. I do not claim to bestow Life as He did - on Lazarus - but maybe as Elisha did - who lay on the deadbody - and breathed life into it -

Or as the Poet of the Gospel did-for he was Poet, whatever else - Poet, whether scientific historian or no.

Do you touch at my meaning? When I write I know. Remember that miraculous saying of the boy Keats -I am certain of nothing, but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination -

Now I am not saying - Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or any such quibble. I am saying that without the Maker's imagination nothing can live for us - whether alive or dead, or once alive and now dead, or waiting to be brought to life -

Oh, I have tried to tell you my truth - and have written only dreary quibbles about poetry. But you know-I do believe you know -

Tell me you know - and that it is not simple - or simply to berejected - there is a truth of Imagination.

Dear Mr Ash,

MacBeth was a Sorcerer - had he not born of woman not put an end to him - with his sharp sword - think you not thatgood King James - with his pious Daemonologie - would not have desiderated his Burning?

Yet in our time you may sit quietly there andplead - oh but I am a mere poet - if I urge that we receive Truth only through the Life - or Liveliness - of Lies - there's no harm in that- since we all take in both withour mother-milk - Indissoluble - it is the human case -

He said -I am the Truth and the Life - what of that, Sir? Was that an approximate statement? Or a Poetic adumbration? Well - was it? It rings - through eternity -I AM -

Not that I will not grant you - now I climb down from my preaching-place, my unattainable pulpit - that there are Truths of your sort. Who that judges does not know - that Lear's agony - and the Duke of Gloucester's pain - are true - tho ' those men never lived - or never lived so - you will tell me that they lived indeed in some sort - and that he - W.S. - sage sorcerer prophet - brought them again to huge Life - so much so that no Actor - could do his part therein, but must leave it to the studium of you and me to flesh it out.

But what a Poet might be in those daysof Giants, which were also the days of the aforesaid King James and his Daemonologie - and not only of his Daemonologie - but of his commissioning of the Word of God in English - so writ then to aftertime that every word of it rings with faith and truth - and has accruedmore, of faith at least - through the centuries - until our own faithlessness -

What a poet was then- seer, daemon, force of nature,the Word - isnot what he is now in our time of material thickening-

It may be that your diligent - reconstitution - like the restorationof old Frescoes with new colours - is our way to the Truth - a discreet patching. Would you acknowledge my simile?

We went to hear another lecture on the recent Spiritual Manifestations, given by a most respectable Quaker - who began with a predisposition to believe in the life of the Spirit - but with no vulgar desire to be shocked or startled. Himself an Englishman, he characterised the English in a manner not wholly alien to the style of the poet Ash. We have undergone - this good man said - adouble process of Induration. Trade - andProtestantabjuration of spiritual relations - have been mutually doing the work of internal pétrificationand ossification upon us. We aregrossly materialist - and nothing will satisfy us but material proofs- as we call them - of spiritual facts - and so the spirits have deigned to speak to us in these crude ways - of rapping- and rustling- and musical hummings- such as once were not needed - when our Faith was alight and alive in us -

He said too the English are particularly indurate by reasonof our denser atmosphere, less electrical and magnetic in its characterthan that of the Americans - who are conspicuously more nervous and excitable than we are - with more genius for socialschemes - more belief in the betterment of Human Nature - whose Minds, like their Institutions - have shot up with a rapidity ofgrowth resembling that of tropicaljungles - and have in consequence greater openness and receptivity. They had the Fox Sisters and the first rapping messages - they the Revelations of Andrew Jackson Davis and his Univercoelum, they fostered the genius of D. D. Home.

Whereas our "telluric conditions" (do you savour the phrase as I do?) are less favourable to the transmission of spiritual impressions. I know not what is your opinion of these matters - with which Society is now so universally busy - that it has stirred the quiet backwaters of our Richmond river-front -?

This letter is not a worthy answer to your inspiring remarks on Keats and poetic truth, or your self-exposition as a prophet-sorcerer. It is not written at White Heat - as others have been - but I must plead that I am not well - that we are not well- both my dear friend and I have been somewhat afflictedwith a slight fever and consequent lowness of spirits. I have spent today in a darkened Room - and feel the benefit of that - but am still weak.

In such a situation fancies easily abuse the mind. I had half made up my mind to plead - no more such letters - leave me quiet with my simple faith - leave me asidefrom the Rush of your intellectandpower of writing - or I am a Lost Soul - Sir -I am threatened in that Autonomy for which have so struggled. Now I have indeed, in a Winding and Roundabout Way - made such a plea - by presenting the thing itself as a hypothetical designation of whatI might say. So whether I might - or Do - so plead -/ leave to your generous judgment.

Dear Miss LaMotte,

You do not forbid me to write again. Thank you. You do not even reproach me strongly with equivocation and dabblingwith arcane powers. Thankyou also for that. And enough - -for the time being - of these harsh subjects.

I was most distressed to hear that you were ill. I cannot think thatthis mild Spring weather - or my letters, so full of goodwill, however else intrusive - could affect you so uncomfortably - and so am reduced to suspecting the oratory of your inspired Quaker - whose telluric conditions of magnetic inertia, whose observation of Induration -I enjoy quite as much as you could have hoped. May he invoke aforce that will, indeed "strike flat the thick rotunditieso'th'earth." There is a masterly lack of logic in accusing an Age of Materialism and then invoking a wholly material spirituality - is there not?

I did not know you walked out so readily or so frequently. I had quite envisaged you barricaded behind your pretty front door - which I imagine, because I am never content without using my imagination, quite embowered in roses and clematis. What should you say if I were to evince a strong desire to hear your reasonableQuaker for myself? You may forbid me cucumber sandwiches, but not spiritual sustenance.

No - do not be anxious -I would do no such thing -I would not risk our friendsh ip -

As for the rappings and tappings - I have not, so far, been much interested in them. I am not, as some are, whetherfor religiousorfor sceptical reasons, convinced that they are nothing- the kind of nothing that emanates from human weakness and gullibility and the strong desire to believe in the loving presence of those lost and much missed, which we must all have felt at times. I like to credit Paracelsus, who tells us that there are minor spirits doomed to inhabit the regions of the air who wander the earth perpetually and whom we might, from time to time, exceptionally, hear or see, when the wind,or the trick of the light, is right. (I believe too that Fraud is a possible and probable explanation for much. I am more ready to believe in D. D. Home's prestigious skills than in any pre-eminent spiritual opening to him.)

It occurs to me - speaking of Paracelsus - that your Fairy Melusine was just such a Spirit in his books - do you know the passage? You must - but I transcribe it because it is of such interest - and to ask if this is the shape of your interest in the Fairy - or is it her more beneficent castle-building propensities that have interestedyou - as I remember you said?

The Melusinas are daughters of kings, desperate through their sins. Satan bore them away and transformed them into spectres, into evil spirits, into horrible revenants andfrightful monsters. It is thought they live without rational souls in fantastic bodies, that they are nourished by the mere elements, and at the final fudgment will pass away with these, unless they may be married to a man. In this case, by virtue of this union, they may die a natural death, as they may have lived a natural life, in their marriage. Of these spectres it is believed thatthey abound in deserts, inforests, in ruins and tombs, in empty vaults, and by the shores of the sea…

Now please tell me, how does your work go? I have most egoistically - and at your generous urging - elaborated on my Ragnarôk and on my Déjà-Vu- but of the Melusina- despite some suggestion that you might not be averse to writing of her - nothing. And yet she it was who caused this correspondence to be opened. I remember, I think, every small word of our one conversation -I rememberyourface - turned aside a little - but decisive -I remember your speaking with such feeling - of the Life of Language- do you rememberthat phrase? I began so ordinary-polite - you said - you hoped to write a long poem on the subject of Melusina - and your eye partly defied me to find fault with this project - as though I could or would - andI asked - was the poem to be in Spenserian stanzas or blank verse or in some othermetre - andsuddenly you spoke - of the power ofverse and the Life of the Language - and quite forgot to look shy or apologetic, but looked, forgive me, magnificent - it is a moment I shall not easilyforget while this machine is to me -

Now -I hope you will write to say that you and of courseMiss Glover - are well-recovered, and able to bear the light of this bright Spring again. I do not so much hope to hear that you are venturing forth to more lectures on the Marvellous - for I am not convinced of their beneficence - but if Quakers and table-turners may have sight of you - maybe one day I may hope - for another discussionof rhyme - if not for the sliced green planisphere -

Dear Mr Ash,

I write to you from an unhappy House - and must be brief-for I have an Invalid dependent upon me - my poor Blanche - quite racked with hideous headaches - and nausea - quite prostrated-and unable to pursue the work which is her life. She is engaged on a large painting of Merlin and Vivien - at the moment of the latter's triumph when she sings the Charm which puts him in her power, to sleep through time. We are very hopeful of this work - 'tis all veiled suggestion and local intensity- but she is too ill and cannot go on. I am not in much better case myself- - but I make tisanes, which I find efficacious - and wet handkerchiefs - and do what I may.

The other members of the household - the servant Jane, my little Dog Tray and Monsignor Dorato the canary, are of no help. Jane is a clumsy nurse - though diligent - and Dog Tray trundles to and fro looking - not commiserating - but reproachful that we do not accompany him to the park, or hurl interesting sticks for him -

So this letter will not be long.

It does me so much Good - that you should write to me of the Melusina- quite as though she were a decided thing - only waiting the accomplishment. I will tell you how the project began - quite back in the mists of time - when I was a child at my dearfather's knee - and he was compiling his Mythologie Française- of which great task I had only an inkling and a wild surmise - I did not know what it might be, his magnum opus as he jokingly said - but I did know, that I had a Papa who told better Talesthan any other Papa - or Mama - or nursemaid - that couldpossibly be imagined. Now, he was in the habit of talking to me some of the time - when his tale-telling ^fr was upon him - as though he were the Ancient Mariner (a much-loved early acquaintance of Mine, through Him) himself- - But some of the time he would talk as though I were a fellow-worker in the field, afellow-scholar, erudite and speculative - and he would talk in three orfour langauges - for he thought in French - and English - and Latin - and of course in Breton. (He did not like to think in German for reasons I shall make clear, though he could and did when occasion arose.)

He told me the tale ofMélusine - often and often - -for the reason, he said, that the very existence of a truly French mythology was dubious - but that if such a thing might be found - the Fairy Mélusine was indisputably one of its eminences and bright stars - My dear father had hoped to do for the French what the Brothers Grimm didfor the German people - recount the true pre-history of the race through the witness of folktale and legend - discover our oldest thoughts as Baron Cuvier spliced together the Mega therium from afew indicative bones and hypothetic ligatures - and his own Wit and powers of Inference. But whereas Germany and Scandinavia have those rich myths and legends from which you drew your Ragnarôk- we French have a few local demons and a few rational tales of trickery in villages - and the Matter of Bretagne, which is also the matter of Britain - and the Druids, of whom my dear Parent made much - and the menhirs and the Dolmens - but no dwarvesand elves - as even the English have - We have the Dames Blanches- the Fate Bianche-I translate - whiteladies - amongst whom my father said Melusina might be numbered, in some of her aspects - for she appears - to warn of Death -

I wish you might have known my father. His conversation would have delighted you. There was nothing he did not know - in his chosenfield - and nothing he knew that was to him Dead Knowledge - but all alive and brilliant and full of importfor our lives - He had always so sad a face - thin and lined and always pale. I thought he was sad for the lack of French mythology - piecing together what he said - but he was sad, I think, to be exiled - and to have no native home - he whose paramount preoccupation - was just the Lares and Penates of the home Hearth.

My sister Sophie took no interest in these matters. She liked things women like - pretty things - she was no reader- it irked her, that we lived secluded - as it irked my mother - who had supposed that a Frenchman was always a galant- a Man of the World - or so I believe she supposed - -for they were ill-matched. My pen runs away with me -I have had little sleep these last three nights - you will think my thoughts are all over the place - how can I be supposing you want my life-history in place of my Melusinaepic? Yet they are so intertwined- and I trust you -

He wore - at first simply for reading - and then always - little round steel-rimmedglasses. I think of these Cold Circles - as the most friendly, the most comfortable and comforting appearance possible - his eyes behind them were underwater Eyes - sad and large and full of veiled friendliness. I wished to become his Amanuensis - and to this endpersuaded him to teach me Greek and Latin, French and Breton, also German - which he did willingly - not to that end - but because he was proud of the speed and economy with which I learned -

Enough of my Papa. I have sadly missed him lately -I think because I have been putting off my epic - and for Reasons -

Yr citation from Paracelsus was of course familiar to me. And with your usual quickness you have seen that I am interested in other visions of the fairy Mélusine - who has two aspects - an Unnatural Monster - and a most proud and loving and handy woman. Now there is an odd word - but no other seems to suffice - all she touched was well done - her palaces squarely built and the stones set on rightly, her fields full of wholesome corn - according to one legend my father discovered she even brought Beans to Poitou - the true haricots - which shows she lived on into the seventeenth century - -for Beans he proves, were not grown beforethat date. Think you not - she was not only Ghoul - but a kind of goddess of Foison - a French Ceres, it might be, or turning to your own mythology, the LadyHolda - or Freya of the Spring - or Iduna of the Golden Apples -?

Her Progeny it is true all had something of the monstrous about them. Not only Geoffroy à la Grande Dent - or Boar's Tusk - but others who became kings in Cyprus and Armenia - had ears like jug-handles - or uneven eyes -

And the Infant Horrible, with three Eyes, whose death she urgently required at Raimondin's hand, at the moment of her metamorphosis - what are we to make of him?

I would write, if I undertookit - a little from Melusina's -own- vision. Not, as you might, in the First Person - as inhabiting her skin - but seeing her as an unfortunate Creature - of Power and Frailty - always in Fear of returning to the Ranging of the Air - the not-eternal - but finally-annihilated - Air -•

I am called. I cannot write more. I must make haste to sealthis - which I fear is a Plaintive Screed - a Convalescent Muttering -I am called again -I must close. Believe me yours most truly

Dear Miss LaMotte,

I trust all is now well in your household,and that work - on the Merlin and Vivien - and on the increasingly fascinating Melusina- continues apace. As for myself- -I have now nearly finished my poem on Swammerdam -I have a rough blocked-out version of the whole -I know what is in and what is never so regretfully eternally abandoned - and when I have tidied up a multitude of imperfections -I shall make you my first fair copy.

I was entranced and moved by your brief portrait of your father - whose prodigious scholarship I have always admired and whose works I have read and reread most frequently. What better Father could a poet have? I was emboldened by your mention of the Ancient Mariner to wonder - was it he who named you and was that for Coleridge's heroine of his unfinished poem? have not had occasion to tell you - though I tell all I meet, with the regularity with which dear Crabb tells his tale of retrieving Wieland's bust -I once met Coleridge, I was once taken to Highgate - when I was very young and green - and had the chance of hearing the Angelic - (and mildly self-important) voice speak on and on - of the existence ofangels and the longevity of yew-trees, and the suspension ofLife in Winter (the banal and the truly profound thick and fast upon each other here) and premonitions and the Duties of Man (not Rights) and how Napoleon's Spies had been hot on his heels in Italy on his return from Malta - and on True Dreamsand Lying Dreams. And more, I think. Nothing on Christabel.

I was so young and green, I worried inordinately that I had no chance, in all this spate of brilliant monologue, to interpose my own voice - to be heard to beable to think in that company - to be remarked. I do notknow what I should have said if I could have spoken. Very likely something futile or silly - some erudite and pointless questioningof his doctrineof the Trinity, or some crude wish to betold the end ofthe poem Christabel. I cannot bear not to know the end of a tale. I will read the most trivial things - once commenced - only out of a feverish greed to be able to swallow the ending - sweet or sour - and to be done with what I need never have embarked on. Are you in my case? Or are you a more discriminating reader? Do you lay asidetheunprofitable? Do you have any privileged insight into the possible ending of the great S.T.C.'s Tale of Christabel?- which teases so, for it is like the very best tales, impossible to predict how it may come out- and yet it must - but we shall never know - its secret sleeps with itslethargic and inconsequentialauthor - who cares not for ourirritable quandary -

I partly see your meaning about Melusina- but hesitate to write thoughts of mine which may distort your thinking - either by causing you annoyance at my imperceptiveness - or worse by muddling the bright tracks of your own ideas.

What is so peculiarly marvellous about the Melusina myth, youseemto be saying, is that it is both wild and strange and ghastly and full ofthe daemonic -and it is at the same time solid as earthly tales - the best of them - are solid - depicting the life of households and the planning of societies, the introduction of husbandry and the love of any mother for her children.

Now -I am greatly daring, and I trust you not to fly out at me scornfully if I am wrong -I see in the gifts you show already in your writings such mastery of both these contradictoryelements - that the Story mayappear to be made for you, to await indeed - You - to tell it.

Both in your wonder-tales and in your fine lyrics - you have a most precise eye and earfor the matter of fact and the detailed-for household linen for instance, for the fine manipulations of delicate sewing - -for actions like Milking - which make a mere man see the world of little domestic acts as a paradisal revelation -

But you are never content to leave it there… your world is haunted by voiceless shapes… and wandering Passions… and little fluttering Fears… more sinister than any conventional Bat or Broomstick-witch.

As if to say - you have the power to render the secure keep ofLusignan - as it might be in the lives of the lords, ladies and peasants in the brilliant colours of a Book of Hours - and yet you can render also - the Voices of the Air - the Wailing - the Siren Song - the Inhuman Grief thatcries down the avenues of the years -

What will you be thinking of me now? I told you -I cannot think of anything without imagining it, without giving it shape in my mind'seye and ear. So, as I said, I have the clearest mental vision of yr unseen Porch, overarched with Clematis - one of those delightful deep-blue violet ones - and little clamberingroses. I have also the clearest vision of your parlour - with its two peaceful Human inhabitants employed -I will not say at netting, but perhaps at reading - aloud, some work of Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Malory - and Monsignor Dorato all lemony plumes in a filigree dome - and your little dog - now of what kind is he? if I were to hazard a guess I would say perhaps a King Charles Spaniel - yes, I see him now, unfortunately clearly, with one chocolate ear and one white and a feathery tail - and yet he is maybe no such thing - but a small hound - a milk-white fine creature such as Sir Thos Wyatt's ladies kept in their mysterious chamber. I have no vision of Jane at all - but that may come. I do have the clearestolfactory ghost of yr tisanes - though they hesitate between verveine and lime and raspberry-leaves, which my own dear mother found most efficacious in case of headache and lassitude.

But I have no right, however I may extend my imagining gaze on harmless chairs and wallcoverings - I have no right to extend my unfortunate curiosity to your work, your writing. You will accuse me of trying to write your Melusina, but it is not so - it is only my unfortunate propensity to try to make concrete in my brain how you would do it - and the truly exciting possibilities open up before me - like vistasof long rides in sun-dappled shade in the mysteriousforest of Brocéliande -I think - so, she will do it - so, she would enter the project. And yet I know your work is nothing if not truly original - my speculations are an impertinence. What can I say? I have never before been tempted to discuss the intricacies of my own writing - or his own - with any other poet -I have alwaysgone on in a solitary and self-sufficient way - but with you I felt from the first that it must be the true things or nothing - there was no middle way. So I speak to you - or not speak, write to you, write written speech - a strange mixture of kinds -I speak to you as I might speak to all those who mostpossess my thoughts - to Shakespeare, to Thomas Browne, to John Donne, to John Keats - and find myself unpardonably lending you, who are alive, my voice, as Ihabitually lend it to those dead men - Which is much as to say - here is an author of Monologues - trying clumsily to constructa Dialogue - and encroachingon both halves of it. Forgive me.

Now if this were a true dialogue - but that is entirely as you may wish it to be.

Dear Mr Ash,

Have you truly Weighed - what you ask of me? Not the Gracile Accommodation of my Muse to your promptings - -for that wd be resisted to the Death of the Immortal - which cannot Be - only Dissipation in Air. But you Overwhelm my small diligence - with Pelion piled on Ossa of Thought andfancy - and if indeed I sit down to answer all as it should be answered - there is the morning quite gone- and what has become either of thesetting of the junket or of the Fairy Melusina?

Yet do not on that account cease to write to me - if I skimp a little on the Fairy-cakes - and write you a truncated and scanty answer -and procrastinate - notunfruitfully - one more day for the Melusina - all may be botched together somehow.

You say you cannot imagineJane. Well -I will tell you, this much - she has a Sweet Tooth - a very sweet tooth. It is beyond her powers to let be a set of little milk-jellies - or delicious macaroons - orbrandy-snaps - in the Larder - without abstracting one insignificant exemplar here - or indenting a Spoon there and leaving traces of her gourmandise. So it is with my sad Self and the inditing of letters. I will not do it I say, until this is quite done - or that embarked on - but in my mind runs an answer to thisthat or the other - and I say to myself - if this argument were disposed of (if just that sweetmeat were tasted and slid down) my mind would be my own again, without agitation -

No, but how ungracious to quibble. I was just asserting -I am no Creature of your thought, nor in danger of becoming so - we are both safe in thatregard. Asfor the Chairs and wall-coverings - imagineaway - think what you will - and I shallfrom time to time write a small Clue - sothat you may be the more thoroughlyconfounded. I will say nothing as to clematis and roses - but we have a veryfine Hawthorn - -just now tressed and heavy with pink and creamyblooms and alive with thatalmondsmell - so sweet - too sweet - that the sense aches at it. I will not say where this Tree is - nor how young or old, large or small - so you will be imagining it not as it is indeed- Paradisal and Dangerous - you know the May must never be brought into the house.

Now I must discipline myself- - and address my wandering wits to your momentous questions - or we are swallowed up, both of us, in frippery imaginations, and vain speculations.

I too have seen S.T.C. I was but an infant - his pudgy Hand rested on my golden curls - his Voice remarked on their flaxen paleness - he said - or I have since by thinking created his voicesaying - for I too, like you, must be imagining, I cannot let things alone -I believe he said "It is a beautiful name and will I trust not be a name of ill omen. " Now this is all the Clue I have to the end of the poem of Christabel- that its heroine was destined for tribulation - which is not hard to see - though how she might obtain Happiness thereafter is harder, if not Impossible.

Now I must change my habitual Tone wholly. Now I must write stringently and not fly about distracting you with flappings of tinsel or demoiselle-flickering. What nonsense in you to pretend to fear, or to fear truly perhaps, that I could be anything but wholly gratified by what you say of the Melusina and of my own powers of writing - of what I might do. You have readmy thoughts - or madeclear to me what were my predispositions - not in an intrusive way - but with true insight. She is indeed - myMelusine - -just such a combination of the orderly and humane with the unnatural and the Wild - as you suggest - the hearth-foundress and the destroying Demon. (And female, which you do not remark on.)

I had not known you were a reader of such childish things as Tales Told in November. Those were my Father'stales, aboveall - and told -only- in those dark months to which they belong. He used to say that those collectors or researchers who went to Britanny in the summer months - when the sea smiles sometimes, and the mist lifts from the granite so that it almost shines - might never come by what they looked for. The true tales were only told on dark nights - after Toussaint, All Saints, had passed. And the November Tales were the worst - of revenants,of demons,ofportents, ofthe Prince of the Powers of the Air. And of the Ankou - who drove a terrible chariot, - a creaking groaning grinding sort of a conveyance anyone might hear behind him on a lonely heath on a dark night - -full of dead bones, it might be, heaped and dangling. And the Driver was a Man of Bones - under his huge hat you saw only his hollow Orbits - he was not, you must know, Death, but Death's Servitor - come with his Scythe - whose blade faced not inward for harvesting but outward- -for what? (I can hear myfather's voice on a dark evening, asking - -for what? And if I tell it to you somewhat flatly - why - it is because the days lengthen, and outside a thrush sings and sings in my foamy May - and all this is Out of Time.) If we are still writing letters to each other in November - as why should we? and why should we not? -I can a tale unfold - and shall - quite in my father's manner. After November came the gentler tales of the Birth of Our Lord - you will remember it is a Breton belief that on that holy day the Beasts talk in the Stalls and Byres - but no man may hear what they say, those sage and innocent creatures - on pain of Death -

Now mark - you must write no more of your interest in my work as a possible Intrusion. You do not seem aware, Mr Ash, for all your knowledge of the great world I do not frequent, of the usual response which the productions of the Female Pen - let alone as in our case, the hypothetick productions - are greeted with. The best we may hope is - oh, it is excellently done -for a woman. And then there are Subjects we may not treat - things we may not know. I do not say but that there must be - and is- some essential difference between the Scope and Power of men and our own limited consciousness and possibly weaker apprehension. But I do maintain, as stoutly, that the delimitations are at present, all wrongly-drawn- We are not mere candleholders to virtuous thoughts - mere chalices of Purity - we think and feel, aye and read- which seems not to shock you in us, in me, though I have concealed from many the extent of my - vicarious - knowledge of human vagaries. Now - if there is a reason for my persistence in this correspondence - it is this very unawareness in you - real or assumed - of what a woman must be supposed to be capable of. This is to me - like a strong Bush, well-rooted is to the grasp of one falling down a precipice - here I hold - here I am stayed -

I will tell you a Tale - no I will not neither, it does not bear thinking on - and yet I will, as an instance of trust- towards You.

I sent some of my smaller poems - a little sheaf- - selectedwith trembling - to a great Poet - who shall be nameless, I cannot write his name - asking - Are These Poems? Have I - a Voice? He replied withcourteous promptness - that they were pretty things - not quite regular- and not always well-regulated by a proper sense of decorum - but he would encourage me, moderately - they would do well enough to give me an interest in life until I had -I quote him exactly - "sweeter and weightier responsibilities. " Now how should I be brought by this judgment to desire those- Mr Ash - how? You understood my veryphrase - the Life of Language. You understand - -in my life Three - and Three alone have glimpsed - that the need to set down words - what I see, so - but words too, words mostly - words have been all my life, all my life - this need is like the Spider's need who carriesbefore her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out- the silk is her life, her home, her safety - her food and drink too - and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew - you will say she is patient - so she is - she may also be Savage - it is her Nature - she Must- or die of Surfeit - do you under stand me?

I can write no more at this time. My heart is too full -I have said too much - if I overlook these sheets, my courage will fail me - so they shall go all uncorrected as they are, with their imperfections on their heads - God bless you and keep you.

Christabel LaMotte

M y dear Friend,

I may call myself your friend, may I not? For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth, - even if like the May, only a threshold-presence, by decree. I write to you now in haste - not to answer your last most generous letter - but to impart a vision, before the strangeness of it fades. An answer you shall and must have - but this I must tell you of, before I lose my courage. Are you curious? I hope so. First I must confess my vision occurred in a ride in Richmond Park. And why must I confess this? May a poet and a gentleman not ride out with friends wherever he pleases? I was invited to take exercise with friends in the Park, andfelt a vague unease as though its woody plantations and green spaces were girdled with an unspoken spell of prohibition - as your Cottage is - as Shalott was to the knights - as the woodsof sleep are in the tale, with their sharp briarhedges. Now on the level of tales, you know, allprohibitions are made only to be broken, must be broken - as is indeed instanced in your own Melusina with striking ill-luck to the disobedient knight. It may be even that I might not have come to ride in the park if it had not had the definite glitter and glamour of the enclosedand barred. Though I must add, as a true nineteenth-century gentleman, I did notfeel it was within my right to saunter past the clematis and roses, or the foamy May-tree, as I might so easily and casually have done - pavements arefree places. I will not exchange my imagined rose-bower for reality until I am invited to step inside it - which may be never. So -I rode within thepale of the Park - and thought of those who dwelt so close to its iron gateways - andfancied that at every turn I might see a half-familiar shawl or bonnet whisk out of sight like one of yr own whiteladies - AndI felt a little irritation with the good Quakergentleman whose stolid telluric conditions have so much more confidence-inspiring virtue than the poetic morality of R. H. Ash -

Now, as all good knights in all good tales do -I was riding along, a little apart, and musing to myself I was making my way along a grassy ride in what you might well have supposed to be an enchanted stillness.In otherparts of the park, Spring had been busy - we disturbeda family of rabbits in the new bracken, which rose in strong little involuted fronds, like new-born serpents, somewhere between the feathered and the scaly - There were hosts of black ravens, very busy and important, striding about and stabbing at the roots of things with their blue-black triangular beaks. And larks rising, and spiders throwing out their gleaming geometrical Traps and staggering butter flies and the unevenly speeding blue darts of the dragonflies.And a kestrel riding the air-currents in superlative ease with its gaze concentrated on the bright earth.

So -I went on, on my own - deeper and deeper into the silent Tunnel of the Ride - not so sure of where I was and yet not anxious either, not concerned about my companions nor even about the nearnessof - certain friends. The trees were beech, and the buds, just breaking, fiercely brilliant, and the new, the renewed light on them - intermittent diamond - butthe depths were dark, a silent Nave. And no birds sang, or I heard none, no woodpecker tapped, no thrush whistled or hopped. And I listened to the increasingQuiet - and my horse went softly on the beech-mast - which was wet after rain - not crackling, a little sodden, not wet enough to plash. And I had the sensation, common enough, at least to me, that I was moving out of time, that the way, narrow and dark-dappled, stretched away indifferently before and behind, and that I was who I had been and what I would become - all at once, all wound in one - and I moved onward indifferently, since it was all one, whether I came or went, or remained still. Now to me such moments are poetry. Do not misunderstandme -I do not mean miss ishly "poetical" - but the source of the drivingforce of the lines - And when I write lines I mean the lines of verse indeed, but also some lines of life which run indifferently through us - -from Origin to Finish. Ah, how can I tell you? And to whom but you could I even begin to describe such indescribable - such obscurely untouchable things? Imagine an abstract sketch such as a drawing-master might make to correct your perspective for you - a fan or tunnel of lines, narrowing not to blindness, not to Nought, but to the Vanishing point, to Infinity. And then imagine these Lines embodied in the soft bright leaves and the pale light and the blue moving over it - and the tall trunks with their grey soft hide diminishing - and the very furrows in the ground - such a unique carpet of such browns and sooty blacks and peat and amber and ash - all distinct and all one- all leading on and yet stationary… I cannot say… I trust you know already…

In the distance there appeared to be a Pool. It lay across my path - abrown pool - deep in colour, uncertain in depth - reflecting the canopy in its dark unbroken surface. I looked at it and looked away, and when I looked back it contained a Creature. I must suppose this Creature to have come there by some minor magic, for it had certainly not been there before, and could hardly have walked there, for the surface remained still and unbroken.

Now the Creature was a small hound, milky-white in colour,with a finely pointed little head and black intelligent eyes. It lay - or couched would be better - it was like the sphinx, couchant- half-above and half-below the water, so that its shoulders and haunches were licked and divided by a fine hairline of surface, and its limbs, below the surface, gleamed through flowing green and amber.Its delicate forefeet were stretched before it and its fine tail curled round about. It was as still as though it was made of marble,andthis not for only one or two moments but for some considerable time.

Round its neck it wore a series of spherical silver bells on a silver chain - not miniature tinkling bells, but large bells, akin to gulls' eggs, or even bantam eggs.

My horse and I stopped and stared. And the creature, stone-still always, stared back, with comfortable confidence, and a look, somehow, ofcommand. I was for a period of several moments wholly undecided as to whether this manifestation were a reality, or a hallucination, or what? Had it come from another time? It lay there so improbably, half-submerged, a veritable Canis aquaticus, a water-spirit emerging, or an earth-spirit half-submerged.

I could not for the life of me press on or make it give way or move or vanish. I stared,it stared. It seemed to me a solid Poem, and you came into my mind, and your little dog and your unearthly creatures walking the earth. There also came into my mind several poems of Sir Thos Wyatt - hunting poems for the most part, but where the creatures of the Chase are denizens of the Court Chamber. Noli me tangere, the beast seemed to proclaim haughtily, and indeed I could not and did not advance upon it, but returned to time and daylight and the time-keeping of daily chatter, as best I might.

Now I write it out - it may seem no great matter to you - or to anyone who may read this account of it. And yet it was. It was a sign. I thought of Elizabeth in the days of her youth hunting in that same park with just such small hounds - a Virgin Huntress - an implacable Artemis - and I fancied I saw her fierce face in its whiteness and the deer running from her. (The full-fed ones I passed cropped the turf contentedly enough, or watched me like statues and snuffed the air of my passing.) Did you know that the Wild Hunt used sometimes, after passing through a homestead, to leave a little dog in the hearth which would be frighted with the right charm but otherwise stayed a year, eating the sustenance of the house, until the Huntsmen came again?

I shall write no more on this topic. I have made myself foolish enough and put my dignity wholly in your hands - with as much trust as you expressedtowards me in your never-to-be-forgotten last letter, which, as I said in opening, shall have its answer.

Let me have your view of my apparition -

Swammerdam needs a touch or two more. He was a queer intellect and a lostsoul - despised and rejected like so many great men - the circumstances of his life almost perfectly coincident with the great preoccupations - nay obsessions - of his nature. Think, my dear friend, of the variousness and the shape-shifting and the infinite extensibility of the humanspirit - that can at one time inhabit a stuffy Dutch Cabinet of Curiosities - and dissect a microscopic heart - andcontemplate a visionary water-hound in the brightest English air and leafiness - and tramp about Galilee considering the lilies of those fields with Renan, and pry unforgivably and infantasy into thesecrets of the unseen room where your head is bent over your paper - and you smile at your work - for by this time Melusina is embarked on and the knight comes to the encounter by the Fountain of Thirst -

My dear Friend,

If I address you So- it is for the Last Time as well as for the First. We have rushed down a Slope -I at least have Rushed - where we might have descended more circumspectly - or Not at All even. It has been borne in upon me that there are dangers in our continued conversation. I fear I lack delicacy in saying so -I see no good way out indeed -I reproach you with nothing - not myself neither - unless with an indiscreet confessional - and of what then - that I loved my father, and was set upon writing an epic?

But the world would not look well upon such letters - between a woman living in a shared solitude as I do - and a man - even if that man were a great and wise poet -

There are those who care for what the world - and his wife - maysay. There are those who are hurt by his bad opinion. It is pointed out to me, quite rightly - that if I amjealous of myfreedom to live as I do - and manage my own affairs - and work my work -I must be more than usually careful to remain sufficiently respectable in the eyes of the world and his wife - to evade his bad opinions - and consequentniggling restrictions on myfreedom of movement.

I would not impugn your delicacy in any thing - or your judgment - or your good faith. Do you not think it would be better - if we were to cease to correspond? I shall be your well-wisher always

Christabel LaMotte

My dear Friend, Your letter came as a shock to me - as you must, of course, haveforeseen, from its complete contrastwith its predecessor, and with the good faith and trust that had grown and subsisted (I thought) between us. I asked myself - what had I done to alarm you so - and answered myself that I had transgressed the bounds of your delineated privacy in coming to Richmond, and not only in coming, but in writing, as I did, of what I had seen. I couldurge you to take that as a whimsical exaggeration of a curiousphaenomenon - though it was not - if I thought truly, upon reflection, that that was the cause of the matter. But it is not - or if it was, after the tone of your letter, it no longer is.

I will confess, I was at first not only shocked, but angry, that you should write so. But too much was at stake - including the delicacy and good judgment and good faith you kindly attribute to me - for me to write back in anger. So I thought long and hard about our correspondence, and about your predicament, as you choose to describeit - of a woman "jealous of her freedom to live as she does." I have no designs on your freedom, I wanted to retort - much the opposite, indeed, I respect and honour and admire that freedom and the product of it, your work, your words, your web of language. I know to my own cost the unhappiness that lack of freedom can bring to women - the undesirability, the painfulness, the waste, of the common restrictions placed upon them. I thought of you most truly as a fine poet and my friend. But - forgive me this necessary failure in delicacy - one thing your letter does is to define usfair and square in relation to each other as a man and a woman. Now, as long as this was not done, we might have gone onforever, simply conversing - with a hint of harmless gallantry, courtly devotion perhaps - but mostly with a surely not illicit desire to speak of the art, or craft, we both profess. I thought this freedom was one you claimed for yourself. What has caused you to retreat so behind a palisade of prickling conventions? Can anything be retrieved? I would make two observations here. The first is that you do not by any means utter a firm resolutionthat we must write no more letters. You write in the interrogative mood - and moreover with a deference to my opinion that is eithermerefeminine deprecation (most mal à propos?) or a true reflection of your state of mind - a not complete certainty of closure in this matter. No - my dear Miss LaMotte -I do not (on the evidence you have offered) think it would be better if we were to cease to correspond. It would not be better for me -I should be almost infinitely a loser, and without any gratifying moralcertainty that I had done a right or noble thing in renouncing a correspondencethat gave me intense delight - andfreedom - and harmed no one. I do not think it would be better for you - but I am not wholly aware of your circumstances -I am open to conviction. I said, I would make two observations. This was the first. The second is, thatyou write - do I go too far - as though your letter was in part dictated by the views of some other person orpersons. I say this most tentatively - but it is very striking - some other voice speaks in your lines - do I divine truly? Now, this may be the voice of someone with much greater claims on your loyalty and attention than I may put forward - but you must be very sure that such a person sees truly and not with a vision distracted by other considerations. I cannot find a tone to write to you thatdoes not veer towards the hectoring or the plaintive. I do not know - so quickly have you become part of my life - how I should do without you.

I should like still to send you Swammerdam. May I do that, at least?

Yours to command

Randolph Ash

My dear Friend,

How shall I answer you? I have been abrupt and ungracious- from fear of Infirmity of Purpose, and because I am a voice - a voice that would be still and small - crying plaintively out of a Whirlwind- which I may not in Honesty describe to you. I owe you an Explanation - and yet I Must Not - and yet I must- or stand convicted of hideous Ingratitude as well as lesser vices.

But Truly Sir it will not do. The -precious- letters - are too much and too little - and above all and first, I should say, compromising.

What a cold sad word. It is His word - the World's word - and her word too, that prude, his Wife. But it entails freedom.

I will expatiate - on freedom and injustice.

The injustice is - that I require my freedom - from you- who respect it sofully. That was a noble saying of yours aboutfreedom - how can I turn from…

I will put in Evidence a brief History. A History of little nameless unremembered acts. Of this our Bethany cottage - which was namedfor a reason. Now to you and in your marvellous Poem - Bethany is the Place where the master called his dead friend to resurrection beforetimes and particularly.

But to us Females, it was a place wherein we neither served nor were served- poor Martha was cumbered with much serving - and was sharp with her sister Mary who sat at His Feet and heard His Word and chose the one thing needful. Now I believe rather, with George Herbert, that"Who sweeps a roomasfor Thy laws - Makesthat and the action fine. " We formed a Project - my dear Companion and myself- - to make ourselves a Bethany where the work of all kinds was carried on in the Spirit of Love and His Laws. We met, you are to know, at one of Mr Ruskin 's marvellous lectures on the dignity of handicraftand individual work. We were Two - who wished to live the Life of the Mind - to make good things. We saw after thought that if we put together the pittances we possessed - and could come by by giving drawing lessons - or by selling Wonder Tales or even Poems - we might make ourselves a life in which drudgery was Artful - wassacred as Mr Ruskin believes is possible - and it was shared, for no Master (save Him Who is Lord of All and visited the true Bethany). We were to Renounce. Not the lives that then encompassedus - cramped Daughterly Devotion to a worldly mother - nor the genteel Slavery of governessing - those were no loss - those were gleefully fled and opposition staunchly met. But we were to renounce the outside World - and the usual Female Hopes (and with them the usual Female Fears) in exchangefor - dare I say Art - a dailyduty of crafting - -from exquisite curtains to Mystical Paintings, from biscuits with sugar roses to the Epic of Melusina. It was a Sealed Pact -I say no more of that. It was a chosen way of life - in which, you must believe, I have been wondrously happy - and not alone in being so.

(And the Letters we have written are with me such an Addiction,I want to ask - have you ever seen Mr Ruskin demonstrate the Art of Nature in the depicting of a veined Stone in a water-glass? So jewel-bright his colours, so fine his pen and brush, so exact his description of why we must seewhat is truly there - but I must not run on - it is right that we should cease -)

I have chosen a Way - dear Friend -I must hold to it. Think of me if you will as the Lady of Shalott - with a Narrower Wisdom - who chooses not the Gulp of outside Air and the chilly river-journey deathwards - but who chooses to watch diligently the bright colours of her Web - to ply an industrious shuttle - to make - something - to close the Shutters and the Peephole too -

You will say, you are no threat to That. You will argue - rationally. There are things we have not said to each other beyond the -One- you sostarkly - Defined.

I know in my Intrinsic Self- - the Threat is there.

Be patient. Be generous. Forgive

Your friend

Christabel LaMotte

My dear Friend,

These last letters have been like Noah's Ravens - they have sped out over the waste waters, across the turgid Thames in these rainy days - andhave not returned or brought back any sign of life. I was most hopeful of the latest-despatched, with Swammerdam with the ink barely dry on him. I thought you must certainly see that you had in some sense called him up- that without your fine perceptions, without your intricate sense of minute inhuman lives, he would have presented an altogether grosser semblance, not so articulate on his dry bones. No other Poem of mine has ever in the slightest been writtenfor a particularReader - onlyfor myself, or some half-conceived Alter Ego. Now, you are not that - it is your difference, your otherness to which I address myself-fascinated, intrigued. And now my vanity - and something more - my senseof HumanFriendship - is hurt that you cannot - for it is nonsense to say that you dare not - even acknowledge my poem.

If I have offended you by calling your last long-ago letter contradictory (which it wasj or timid (which it was,) then you mustforgive me. You may well ask why I am so tenacious in continuing writing to one who has declared herself unable to maintain a friendship (which she alsodeclared to be valuable to herself) and remains resolute in silence, in rejection. A lover might indeed in all honour accept such a congé- but a peaceable, a valued friend? It is not as though I ever breathed - or scribbled or scratched - the faintest hint of any improper attention - no "if things were otherwise, ah well then…"no "Your eyes, which I know to be bright, mayperuse… " - no - all was straightforward from my honest thoughts which are closer to my essential self than any such nonsensicalgallantry - and this you cannot support?

And why am I so tenacious? I hardly know myself. For the sake of future Swammerdams, it may be - for I see that I had insensibly come to perceive you - mock not - as some sort of Muse.

Could the Lady of Shalott have written Melusina in her barred and moated Tower?

Well, you will say, you are too busy writing the poetry itself, to require employment as a Muse. I had not thought the two were incompatible - indeed they might even be thought to be complementary. But you are adamant.

Do not be misled by my mocking tone. It is all that seems to come. I shall hope against hope - that this letter is the Dove which will return with the hoped-for Olive-Branch. If not, I shall cease to bother you.

Ever yours most truly

R. H. Ash

Dear Mr Ash,

This is not the first time this letter has been embarked on. I know neither how to start nor how to proceed. A Circumstance has arisen - no, I know no longer how to write, neither, for how could a circumstance arise, or what appearance might such a creature - bear?

Dear Sir - your Letters have not reached me - -for a Reason. Not your Rauen-ous letters - nor yet, to my infinite loss - your Poem. I fear -I know indeed, with all but ocular proof positive - they have been Taken.

Today I happened - to run a little faster togreet the Postman. There was almost apapery - Tussle. I snatched. To my shame - to our shame - we - snatched.

I ask you -I beg you -I have told you the Truth - do not condemn. My honour was beingguarded - and if I do not exactly share theconception of Honour which prompted the zealous carefulness-I must be grateful, I must, I am.

But to stoop to Theft

Oh, Sir, I am torn by contrary emotions. I am grateful, as I havesaid. But I must be very angry to have been so deceived - andangry on your behalf- -for though I might have thought it best - not to answer those letters - no one else had the right to interfere with them - whatever the motive.

I cannot find them. They are torn to shreds, I am told. And Swammerdam with them. How shall that be forgiven? And yet - how may it not?

This house - so happy once - isfull of weeping and wailing and Black Headache like a Painful Pall - Dog Tray slinks to and fro - Monsignor Dorato is silenced - and I -I pace up and down - I ask myself to whom I may turn - and think of you my Friend, the unwitting cause of so much Woe-

It is all misapprehension, I know. I no longer know what was right and wrong about the Original Step - to discontinue the writing - If it was to safeguard - domesticharmony - that is now most thoroughly jangled, out of tune and harsh. Oh, dearfriend -I am so very angry-I see strange fiery flashesbefore my drowned eyes -

I dare not write more. I cannot be sure that any furthercommunication of yours will reach me - intact - or at all - Your Poem is lost. And shall I give up - so? I who have fought for my Autonomy against Family and Society? No, I will not. In the known risk of appearing - Inconsequential, Tergiversatory, infirm of purpose and feminine-I ask you - is it possible for you to walk in Richmond Park - when shall I say - you will be occupied - any day the next three days at about eleven in the morning. You will urge that the Weather is inclement. These lastfew dayshave been fearful. The Water has been so high - with each high Tide the Thames advances and runs in overforeshore and quay wall - climbing that, with watery ferocity - and laughing and slapping its way acrossthe cobbledpavements on the bank - invading people's gardens, paying no attention to wicket-gates or woodenfence - but creeping sinuously - and bubbling up - brown and strong - bringing with it a trail of such things- cotton waste, feathers, soakinggarments, dead small creatures - overtopping pansy and Forget-me-nots - and aspiring to early Hollyhock. But I shall be there. I shall step out with Dog Tray - he at least will thank me wholeheartedly - in solid boots and armed with an umbrella -I shall enter by the Richmond Hill gate of the Park - and perambulate near there - if you should chuse to come.

I have an Apology to make that I wish to make in Person.Here is your Olive-branch. Will you receive it?Oh, the lost poem -

Your true friend

My dear friend, I hope you got safe home. I watched till you were out of sight - two determinedlittle bootedfeet and four loping grey clawedones setting up small fountains as you went, without once looking back. You at least did not do so - but Dog Tray once or twice twisted his grey head, I hope regretfully. How could you deliberately mislead me so? There was I, looking diligently about me for a King Charles Spaniel, or a milky sharp small hound - and there were you, quite overwhelmed and half-hidden by a huge gaunt grey creature out of some Irish fairytale or Northern saga of wolf-hunting. What else have you so mischievouslymisrepresented to me? My ideaofyr Bethany House revises itself daily now - eaves shift, windows laugh and lengthen, hedges advance and retreat - it is all a perpetual shape-shifting and adjust ment - nowhere constant. Ah, but I saw your face, even if only in flashes under the dripping brim of a bonnet and the arching shadow of that huge and most purposeful umbrella. And I held your hand - at the beginning and the end - it rested in mine, with trust, I hope and believe.

What a walk, in what a wind, never-to-be-forgotten. The clashing together of our umbrella-spines as we leaned to speak, and their hopeless tangling; the rush of air carrying our wordsaway; the torn green leaves flying past, and on the brow of the hill the deer running and running against that labouring mounting mass of leaden cloud. Why do I tell you this, who saw it with me? To share the words too, as we shared the blast and the sudden silence when the wind briefly dropped. It was very much your world we walked in, your watery empire, with the meadows all drowned as the city of Is, and the trees all growing down from their roots as well as up - and the clouds swirling indifferently in both aerial and aquatic foliage -

What else can I say? I am copying Swammerdamyêr you again - a problematic labour as I keep discoveringsmall defects, some of which I mend and some of which merely make me anxious. You shall have him next week. Next week we shall walk again, shall we not, now it is very clear to you that I am no ogre, but only a mild and somewhat apprehensive gentleman?

And did you find - as I did - how curious, as well as very natural, it was that we should be so shy with each other, when in a papery way we knew each other so much better?I feel I have always known you, and yet I search for polite phrases and conventional enquiries - you are more mysterious in your presence (as I suppose most of us may be) than you seem to be in ink and scribbled symbols. (Perhaps we all are so. I cannot tell.)

I will not write more now. I have addressed this, as requested, to the Richmond Poste Restante. I do not wholly like this subterfuge - I do not like the imputed shady dealing of such a step - I find it inhibiting. Nor can you, with your quick moral discernment and yr proud sense of yr own moral autonomy, find it at all easy. Can we not think of something better? Will the urgency diminish? I am in your hands, but unquiet. Let me know, if you are able, that you have receivedthis first waiting-letter. Let me know how you are, and that we may meet again soon. My respects to Dog Tray -

My dear Friend,

Your letter came safely. Your word of- - subterfuge - hit home. I will think- there are Veils and Whirligigs of hindrances -I will think- and hope I may come up with more than - a headache.

I shall not easilyforget our shining progress across the wet earth. Nor any Word you said - not the most courteousNothing - nor yet the moments snatched to speak Truth andJustice about the Future Life. I hope you may be convincedthatMrs Lees' seances are worthy of your serious consideration. They bring such unspeakableComfort - to the deeply grieving. Last week a Mrs Tompkins held her dead infant on her knees for upward of ten minutes - his very weight, she said, his very curling fingers and toes - how can mother-love be mistaken? The Father too, was able to touch the soft curls of this briefly-returnedbeing. There was too, glancing unearthlylight - and a ghost of a sweet perfume.

It is most true as you say, that embodied - I had almost writ confrontation -conversation- unsettles the Letters. I know not - what to write. My pen is reluctant. I am overawed by your voice - in truth - by Presence- however taken. Shall we see each other again? Will it do good or harm? Dog Tray - who sends his respects - knows it will do good - and I know nothing - so let it be Tuesday - if you come not, I will look in the Poste Restante, where I stand beside seamen's wives, andfashionable Creatures, and a dour Tradesman whose face creases to thunder when nothing is producedfor him.

I long for Swammerdam.

Your true friend

My dear,

I was about to begin in this vein - "how can I apologise?" and so forth - "a moment's madness" - then I thought I might circumvent the whole happening, deny that Magnets rush towards each other, and deny it so steadily, the lie might become a kind of saving fiction that held a kind of truth. But the Laws of Nature deserve as much respect as any other, and there arehuman laws as strong as the magnetic field of iron and lodestone - if I deviate into lying, to you to whom I have never lied -I am lost.

I shall see you - as you were the moment before the madness - until the day I die. Your little face, with its pale candour, turned to me - and your hand out - in the watery sunshine, between the great trees. And I could have takenyour hand - or not takenyour hand - could I not? Either? But now only the one. Never have I felt such a concentration of my whole Being - on one object, in one place, at one time - a blessed eternity of momentariness that went on forever, it seemed. I felt you call me, though your voice said something different, something about the rainbow spectrum - but the whole of you, the depth of you called to me and I had to answer - and not with words - this wordless call. Now is this only my madness? With you in my arms (I tremble as I remember it to write it) I was sure it was not.

Now, away from you, I do not know what you think or feel.

But I must speak. I must say to you what is in my mind. The unforgivable embrace was no sudden impulse - no momentary excitation - but camefrom what is deepest in me, and I think also what is best. I must tell you - ever since that first meeting, I have known you were my fate, however from time to time I may have disguised that knowledge from myself.

I have dreamed nightly of your face and walked the streets of my daily life with the rhythms of your writing singing in my silent brain. I have called you my Muse, and so you are, or might be, a messengerfrom some urgent place of the spirit where essential poetry sings and sings. I could call you, with even greater truth - my Love - there, it is said-for I most certainly love you and in all ways possible to man and most fiercely. It is a love for which there is no place in this world - a love my diminished reason tells me can and will do neither of us any good, a love I tried to hide cunningly from, to protect you from, with all the ingenuity at my command. (Except completesilence, you will rightly say, which was out of my power.) We are rational nineteenth-century beings, we might leave the coup de foudre to the weavers of Romances - but I have certain evidence that you know what I speak of, thatyou acknowledged, however momently (that infinite moment) that at least what I claim is true.

And now, I write to ask, what are we to do? How shall this be the end, that is in its very nature a beginning? I knowfully thatthis letter will cross one from you which will say, wisely and rightly, that we must meet no more, no more see one another - that even the letters, that space of freedom, must be put an end to. And the plot which holds us, the conventions which bind us, declarethat I must, as a gentleman, acquiesce in that requirement, at leastfor a time, and hope that Fate, or the plotter who watches over our steps will decree some further meeting, some accidental re-opening…

But, my Dear, I cannot do this. It goes against nature - not my own particularly, but Dame Nature herself- - whothis morning smiles at me in and through you, so that everything is alight - -from the anemones on my desk to the motes of dust in the beam of sunlight through the window, to the words on the page in front of me (John Donne) with you, with you, with you. I am happy - as I have never been happy - who should be writing to you in who can say whatagony of mind full of guilt and horrified withdrawal.

I see your quizzical little mouth and I reread your riddling words about the Ants and Spiders - and I smile, to think you are all the time there, poised and watchful - and something more, that I know of, whether you will or no…

What do I ask? you will enquire in your precise and yet mocking way - cutting down my protestations to preciseproposals. I do not know - how can I know? I only cast myself upon your mercy, not to be cut off, not scantedwith a single famished kiss, not yet, not now. Can we not find a small space, for a limited time - in which to marvel that we have found each other?

Do you remember - no, of course you must remember - how we saw the Rainbow, from the brow of our hill, under our clump of trees - where light suffused the watery drops in the indrownedair - and the Flood was stayed - and we - we stood under the arch of it, as though the whole Earth were ours, by new Covenant - Andfrom foot to distantfoot of the rainbow is one bright, joined curve, though it shifts with our changing vision.

What a convoluted Missive, to lie and gather dust,maybeforever, in the Poste Restante. I shall walk, from time to time, in the Park, and waiteven, under those same Trees - and trust you will forgive - and a little more

Your R.H.A.

Oh Sir - things flicker and shift, they are indeed all spangle and sparks and flashes. I have sat by my fireside all this long evening - on my safe stool- turning my burning cheeks towards the Aspirations of the flame and the caving-in, the ruddy mutter, the crumbling of the consumed coals to - where am I leading myself- - to lifeless dust- Sir.

And then- out there- when the Rainbow stood out on the dark air over a drowning world - no Lightning struck those Trees, nor trickled along their Wooden Limbs to earth - yet flame licked, flame enfolded, flame looped veins - burned up and utterly consumed -

Struck trees die black

Fire in the Air

Leaves not a Wrack of bone or hair -

Our first Parents hid under such strong circling trees, I believe - but the Eye saw them - who had incautiously eaten knowledge which was death to them -

If the world shall not be drowned with water a secondtime - it is certain how we shall perish - it is told us -

And you also - in Ragnarôk- matched Wordsworth's fleet waters of a drowning world - with - the tongues of Surtur's flames that lapped the shores - Of all the earth and drunk its solid crust - And spat it molten gold on the red heaven -

And after that - a rain - of Ash -

Ash the sheltering World-Tree,

Ash the deadly Rain

So Dust to Dust and Ash to Ash again -

I see whole beviesof shooting stars - likegold arrows before my darkening eyes - theypresage Headache - but beforethe black- and burning -I have a small light spaceto say - oh what? I cannot let you burn me up. I cannot. I shouldgo up - not with the orderly peace of my beloved hearth here - with its miniature caverns of delight, its hot temporary jewel-gardens with their palisadoes and promontories - no -I shall go up - like Straw on a Dry Day - a rushing wind - a tremor on the air - a smell of burning - a blown smoke - and a deal of white fine powder that holds its spillikin shape only an infinitesimal moment and then is random specks- oh no I cannot -

You see, Sir, I say nothing of Honour, nor of Morality - though they are weighty matters - I go to the Core, which renders much disquisition on these matters superfluous. The core is my solitude, my solitude that is threatened, that you threaten, without which I am nothing- so how may honour, how may morality speak to me?

I read your Mind, my dear Mr Ash. You will argue now for a monitored and carefully limited combustion - afire-grate with bars and formal boundaries and brassy finials -ne progredietur ultra-

But I say - your glowing salamander is a Firedrake. And there will be - Conflagration -

Before Migraine-headaches there is a moment of madness. This has extended from the burning in the clearing - until this minute - and now speaks.

No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed. Not that I have not dreamed of walking in thefurnace - as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego - But we latter-day Reasonable Beings have not the miracle-working Passion of the old believers -

I have known - Incandescence - and must decline to sample it further. The headache proceeds apace. Half my head - is merely a gourd full of pain - Jane will post this so it goes now. Forgive its faults. And forgive me.

Christabel

My dear,

What am I to make of your missive -I had almost writ missile - which as I foretold has crossed mine - but which as I had not the couragetoforetell is not a cool denial but a most heated riddling, to take up your metaphor? You are a true poet - when you are agitated, or discomposed, or unusually interested in any matter - you express your ideas in metaphor. So what am I to make of all this scintillation? I will tell you - a Pyre from which you, my Phoenix, shall fly up renewed and unchanged - the gold more burnished, the eye brighter -semper eadem.

And is it an effect of Love - to set beside each of us, like a manifest emanation some mythic monstrous and inhuman self? So thatit becomes easy and natural for you to write as a Creature of the burning fiery furnace, a hearth-salamander turned Firedrake of the air, and easy and naturalfor you to see me in both mythic readings at once of my pliable name - the World-Tree consumed to its papery remnants. Youfeel - as I feel -elemental in thisforce. All creation rushed round us out there - earth, air, fire, water, and there we were, I beg you to remember, warm and human and safe, in the circle of the trees, in each other's arms, under the arch of the sky.

The most important thing to make clear to you is this. I make no threat to your solitude. How should I? How may I? Is not your blessed desire to be alone the only thing which makespossible what would else in very truth harm someone?

This agreed - may we not, in some circumscribed way - briefly, perhaps, probably - though it is Love's Nature to know itself eternal - andin confined spaces too - may we not steal some -I almost wrote small, but it will never be that - somegreat happiness? We must come togrief and regret anyway - and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities. All of which casuistry is only to say, my very dear, come back to the Park, let me touch your hand again, let us walk in our decorous storm together. There may well come a moment when this will be impossible, for manygood reasons - but you know, andfeel, as I know andfeel that this moment of impossibility is not yet, is not now?

I am reluctant to take my pen from the paper andfold up this letter-for as long as I write to you, I have the illusion that we are in touch, that is, blessed. Did you know, speaking of dragons as we were, and ofconflagration and intemperate burning - that the Chinese dragon, who in Mandarin is Lung- is a creature not of the fiery but exclusively of the watery element? And thus a cousin of your mysterious Melusina in her marble tub? Which is to say, there may be cooler dragons, who may take more temperate pleasures. He appears, blue and winding, on Chinese dishes, with a sprinkling mane and accompanied by what I once took to be little flakes of fire, and now know to be curlings of water.

What a page of prose to lie like some bomb in the Poste Restante. I am become, in the last two days, a restless Anarchist.

I shall wait under the trees - from day to day, at your time - and look outfor a woman like a steady upright flame and a grey hound poured along the ground like smoke -

I know you will come. All along, what I have known, has been. It is not a state of affairs I normally experience, nor one I ever required - but I am an honest man, and recognise what is, when it is… So you will come. (Not peremptory but quiet, this knowing -)

Your R.H.A.

Dear Sir

I am too proud - to say I knew, I should not have come - and yet came. I acknowledgemy Acts- of which all that trépidant walk was one- from Mount Ararat Road to the Tempting Knoll - with Dog Tray circling and growling -He loves you not, Sir - and the end of that sentence could be - "and nor do I" as well as the more expected ending "whatever I may feel. " Were you happy I came? Were we godlike as you promised? Two earnest pacers, pointing diligent toes in the dust. Did you remark - setting Electrical Powers and Galvanic Impulses aside for the moment - how shy we are one with another? Mere acquaintances, if not on paper. We pass the time of day - andthe Time of the Universe has a brief stop at our fingers' touch - who are we? who? - would you not rather have the freedom of the white page? Is it alas too late? Is our primaeval innocence gone?

No -I am out -I am out of my Tower and my Wits. I have my cottage to myself for a few brief hours - Tuesday afternoon - ca 1.00 p.m. - should you care to reconnoitre the humdrum truth of your imagined Bower - of -?

Will you take Tea?

Oh, I regret much. Much. And there are things that must be said - soon now - and will find their moment.

I am sad, sir, today - low and sad - sad that we went walking, yet sad too, that we are not walking still. And that is all I can write, for the Muse hasforsaken me - as she may mockinglyforsake all Women, who dally with Her - and then - Love -

Your Christabel

My Dear

So now I may think of you in truth - in your little Parlour - presiding over theflowering little cups - with Monsignor Dorato prinking and trilling, not, as I had hypothesised, in a Florentine palazzo but in a very Taj Mahal of burning brass wires. And over the mantel, Christabel before Sir Leo-line- yourself caught like a statuewith colouredlightstrikinggarishly across you and an equallyfrigid Dog Tray. Who ranged, busily seeking, with his hackles likeporpentine quills andhis softgrey lip wrinkled in asnarl - truly, as you say, he at least does not love me, and once or twice threatenedmy composedattention to the excellentseed cake,and rattled cup andsaucer. And no porch with tumbling flowers - all vanishing froth andfantasy - but stiff tall Roses like a thicket of sentinels.

I think your house did not love me, and I should not have come.

And it is true, as you said, across the whole hearth,thatI too have a house, which we have not described or even spoken of. And that I have a wife. You asked me to speak of her and I wasspeechless. I know not how you construed that - I grant it was your absolute right to ask - and yet I couldnot answer. (Though I knew you must ask.)

I have a wife, and I love her. Not as I love you. Now, I have satfor half-an-hour, having written those bleak little sentences, and quite unable to go on. There aregood reasons -I cannot discuss them, but they aregood, if not absolutelyadequately good - why my love for you need not hurt her. I know this must sound bald and lame. It must, most probably, be what many men, philandering men, have said before me -I do not know -I am inexperienced in these matters and never thought to find myself writing such a letter. I find I can say no more, only aver that I believe what I have said to be true and hope that I shall not lose you by this necessary uncouthness.

To discuss this any further would be the most certain way to betray her. I should feel the same if the question were ever to arise of discussing you- with anyone at all. Even the implicit analogy is distressing - you mustfeel it. What you are is yours- what we have - if anything - isours.

Please destroy this letter - whatever you do or have done with the rest - because in itself it constitutes such a betrayal.

I hope the Muse has not indeedforsaken you - even briefly, even for so long as a Teatime. I am writing a lyric poem - most intransigent - about Firedrakes and Chinese Lung dragons - a conjuration, it might rightly be called. It is to do with you- as everything I do these days, or think, or breathe, or see is to do withyou - but it is not addressed to you - those poems are to come.

If any answer comes to this plain letter -I shall know both that you are generous indeed, and that our small space is ours - -for our short time - until the moment of impossibility makes itself known -

Your R.H.A.

My dear Sir,

Yr plainness and yr reticence can do you nothing but Honour - if that might be thought to be pertinent in this - Pandora's Box - we have opened - or wet Outdoors we have ventured into. I find I can write no more - indeed and indeed my Head Hurts - and matters in this House - of which I shall not speak, from something the same motivesof I hope honour - enfin, they do not go well. Can you be in the park on Thursday. I have matters to impart that I would rather speak.

Ever,

C

My dear

My Phoenix is temporarily a woebegone and even bedraggled bird - speaking uncharacteristically small and meek - and even from moment to moment deferential. This will not do - this may not be -I will renounceall, all my heart's happiness, I say - to see you brighten and flare as you were wont. I would do all in my power that you might sparkle in your sphere as ever before -even renounce my so-much-insisted-upon claim on you. So tell me - not that you are sad, but why you are so, and truthfully, and I will take it upon me to mend what's ill, if it lies in my power. Now write back to me as you may, and come again on Tuesday.

Always,

R.H.A.

Dearest Sir,

In faith I know not why I am so sad. No -I know - it is thatyou take me out of myself and give me back - diminished -I am wet eyes - and touched hands - and lips am I too - a very present - -famished-fragment of a woman- who has not her desire in truth - and yet has desire superabundantly - ah - this is painful -

And you say - so kind you are -"I love you. I love you."- and I believe - but who is she - who is "you"? Is she - -fine fair hairand - whatever yearns so -I was once something else - something alone and better -I was sufficient unto my self- and now I range - busily seeking with continual change. I might be less discontented if my daily Life were happy, but it is become a brittle tissue of silence and needle-sharp reproach punctuating. I stare proudly - and seem most ignorant where I am most sharply knowing - and known- but this costs - it is not easy - it is not good.

I read yr John Donne.

But we, by a love so much refined,

That ourselves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

This is a fine phrase - "inter-assured of the mind." Do you believe it is possible to find such - safe mooring - in the howling gale?

And I have now a new word in my vocabulary, much hated, to which I am enslaved - it goes "And if- -”

“And if- - "And if we had time and space to be together - as we have allowed ourselves to wish to be - then we would be free together - whereas now - caged?

My dear,

The true exercise of freedom is - cannily and wisely and with grace - to move inside what space confines - and not seek to know what lies beyond and cannot be touched or tasted. But we are human - and to be human is to desire to know what may be known by any means. And it is easier to miss lips hands and eyes when they are grown a littlefamiliar and are not at all to be explored, the unknown calling. "And if we had a week - or two - what would we not make of it? And maybe we shall. We are resourceful and intelligent persons.

I would not for the whole world diminish you. I know it is usual in these circumstances to protest -"I love you for yourself alone" -"I love you essentially" - and as you imply, my dearest, to mean by "you essentially" - lips hands and eyes. But you must know - we do know - that it is not so - dearest, I love your soul and with that your poetry - the grammar and stopping and hurrying syntax of your quick thought - quite as much essentially you as Cleopatra's hopping was essentially hers to delight Antony - more essentially, in that while all lips hands and eyes resemble each other somewhat (though yours are enchanting and also magnetic) - your thought clothed with your words is uniquely you, came with you, would vanish if you vanished -

The journey I spoke of is not finally decided on. Tugwell finds himself greatly involved in his work at home - and though the project was long ago decided upon for when the weather should be clement - to be civilised these days requires an intelligent interest in the minuter forms of life and the monstrous permanentforms of the planet - it now hangsfire. And I who was all enthusiasm - now hangfire -hang upon fire- -for how should I willingly go so far from Richmond?

Until Tuesday then

P.S. Swammerdam is almost ready once more.

Dearest Sir,

My dubious Muse is back. I send you (unperfected) what She has dictated.

The grassy knoll

Shivers in His embrace

His muscles - roll

About - about - His Face

Smiles hot and gold

Over the small hill's brow

And every fold

Contracts and stiffens - now

He gathers strength

His glistering length

Grips, grips: the stones

Cry out like bones

Constricted - earth - in pain

Cries out - again -

He grips and smiles -

My very dear,

I write in haste - I fear your answer -I know not whether to depart or no -I will stay, for you- unless this small chance you spoke of prove a true possibility. Yet how may that be? How could you satisfactorily explain such a step? How can I not nevertheless hope?

I do not wish to do irreparable damage to your life. I have so much rational understanding left to me, as to beg you - against my own desires, my own hope, my own true love - to think before and after. If by any kind of ingenuity it may be done satisfactorily so that you may afterwards live as you wish - well then -if it may - this is not matter for writing. I shall be in the Church at noon tomorrow.

I send my love now and always

.

Dear Sir,

It is done. BY FIAT. I spoke Thunder - andsaid - so it shall be- and there will be no questionsnow - or ever - and to this absolute Proposition I have - like all Tyrants - meek acquiescence.

No more Harm can be done by this than has already been done - not by your will - though a little by mine - -forI was (and am) angry

.