PREFACE: MANY of these Soliloquies have appeared in The Athenaeum, and one or more in The London Mercury, The Nation, The New Republic, The Dial, and The Journal of Philosophy. The authors thanks are due to the Editors of all these reviews for permission to reprint the articles. For convenience, three Soliloquies on Liberty, written in 1915, have been placed in the second group and perhaps it should be added that not a few of the later pieces were written in France, Spain, or Italy, although still for the most part on English themes and under the influence of English impressions. CONTENTS PAGE: PROLOGUE I SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND, 1914-1918 I. ATMOSPHERE 2. GRISAILLE . 3. PRAISES OF WATER 4. THE TWO PARENTS OF VISION 5 . AVERSION FROM PLATONISM 6. CLOUD CASTLES . 7. CROSS-LIGHTS 8. HAMLETS QUESTION 9. THE BRITISH CHARACTER . 10. SEAFARING . I I. PRIVACY . 12. THE LION AND THE UNICORN 13. DONS 14. APOLOGY FOR SNOBS I 5. THE HIGHER SNOBBERY . I 6. DISTINCTION IN ENGLISHMEN I 7. FRIENDSHIPS 18. DICKENS . 19. THE HUMAN SCALE 20. ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE . 21. THE ENGLISH CHURCH . 22. LEAVING CHURCH . 2 j.
DEATH-BED MANNERS vii 2 SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND of song the music of it runs away with the words, and even the words, which pass for the names of things, are but poor wild symbols for their unfathomed objects. So arc these SoIiIoquies compared with their occasions and I should be the first to hate their verbiage, if a certain spiritual happiness did not seem to breathe through it, and redeem its irrelevance. Their very abstraction from the time in which they were written may commend them to a free mind. Spirit refuses to be caught in a vice it triumphs over the existence which begets it. The moving world which feeds it is not its adequate theme. Spirit hates its father and its mother. It spreads from its burning focus into the infinite, careless whether that focus burns to ashes or not. From its pinnacle of earthly time it pours its little life into spheres not temporal nor earthIy, and half in playfulness, half in sacrifice, it finds its joy in the irony of eternal things, which know nothing of it. Spirit, however, cannot Ay from matter without material wings the most abstract art is compacted of images, the most mystical renunciation obeys some passion of the heart.
Images and passion, even if they are not easily recognizable in these Soliloquies as now coldly written down, were not absent from them when inwardly spoken. The images were English images, the passion was the love of England and, behind England, of Greece. What I love in Greece and in England is contentment in iinitude, fair outward ways, manly perfection and simplicity. Admiration for England, of a certain sort, was instilled into me in my youth. My father who read the language with ease although he did not speak it had a profound respect for British polity and British power. In this admiration there was no touch of sentiment nor even of sympathy behind it lay something like an ulterior con tempt, such as we fed for the strong man exhibiting at a fair. The performance may be astonishing but the achievement is mean. So in the middle of the nineteenth century an intelligent foreigner, the native of a county materially impoverished, could look to England for a model of that irresistible energy and public discipline which afterwards were even more conspicuous in Bismarckian Germany and in the United States.
It was admiration for material PROLOGUE 3 progress, for wealth, for the inimitable gift of success and it was not free, perhaps, from the poor mans illusion, who jealously sets his heart on prosperity, and lets it blind him to the subtler sources of greatness...
