The force I
spent on art has gone to swell life and augment it; it heightens
perception, it intensifies joy--it was the fevered lust of
expression that drained the vigour of my days and hours.
But am I then satisfied with the part I play? Do I feel that my
faculties are being used, that I am lending a hand to the great sum
of toil? I used to feel that, or thought I felt it, in the old
days, but now I see that I walked in a vain delusion, serving my
own joy, my own self-importance. Not that I think my old toil all
ill-spent; that was my work before, as surely as it is not now; but
the old intentness, the old watching for tone and gesture, for
action and situation, that has all shifted its gaze, and waits upon
God. It may be, nay it is certain, that I have far to go, much to
learn; but now that I may perhaps recover my strength, life spreads
out into sunny shallows, moving slow and clear. It is like a soft
sweet interlude between two movements of fire and glow; for I see
now, what then I could not see, that something in my life was burnt
and shrivelled up in my enforced silence and in my bitter loss--
then, when I felt my energies at their lowest, when mind and bodily
frame alike flapped loose, like a flag of smut upon the bars of a
grate, I was living most intensely, and the soul's wings grew fast,
unfolding plume and feather.
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