Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Journal to Rosalind, 1920
Shall I trace this drama step by step? A few phrases will suffice. I was a spiritual wreck, he writes, thrown up by the gales of disappointment on to the rocky, jagged crags of political despair, artistic chagrin and spiritual starvation, an old hulk, a memory of what might have been, a thing suggesting vast possibilities lost. You salved me - you did what others thought impossible. You, you alone, drew me from the rocks of oblivion and set me once more sound and taut on the waves of great endeavour. Again: The rosy hopes you bring are those which I not long ago buried as wholly or in part unrealizable. Again: The useless past is now a fruitful river bearing rich cargoes. One motto of the book indeed might be: Out of the mire of worthless effort up to the work-dream [of my youth. The artist, through the lover, has come into his own, he feels a new possession of essentials You have brought me, he says, back through a mystery to the loveliness of art. Love has atlast enabled him to possess the best in himself and share it with humanity. And, as always happens when the spirit is in candescent, he finds himself, this lover, a spokes man of reality, of spiritual truth. We sub mit, he says, to a world of ideas already made. All nature gives the lie to our sys tem of life. With the seers he has discovered that without full expression there is no liv ing. He has found and he proclaims the secret of that grace which preserves the spirit in its glow and the mind from satisfaction and decay. It is the grace of the poet, a grace to which the poet in every man responds. The poet in many will, I think, respond to this jour nal. They will remember, above all, perhaps, these beautiful words, dictated by the supreme experience of a life and reminiscent of Goethe: The tender green will some day clothe our wishes so long as the sap of big desire is there to animate our souls. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.