i sit here in this graciously proportioned little room which i shall leave for ever next week, for already your mother begins to pack for england again. i look out upon the neat french garden that i have watched the summer round, and before me is the pile of manuscript that has grown here, the story of my friendship and love for mary and of its tragic end, and of all the changes of my beliefs and purposes that have arisen out of that. i had meant it to be the story of my life, but how little of my life is in it! it gives, at most, certain acute points, certain salient aspects. i begin to realize for the first time how thin and suggestive and sketchy a thing any novel or biography must be. how we must simplify! how little can we convey the fullness of life, the glittering interests, the interweaving secondary aspects, the dawns and dreams and double refractions of experience! even mary, of whom i have labored to tell you, seems not so much expressed as hidden beneath these corrected sheets. she who was so abundantly living, who could love like a burst of sunshine and give herself as god gives the world, is she here at all in this pile of industrious inexpert writing?
life is so much fuller than any book can be. all this story can be read, i suppose, in a couple of hours or so, but i have been living and reflecting upon and reconsidering the substance of it for over forty years. i do not see how this book can give you any impression but that of a career all strained upon the frame of one tragic relationship, yet no life unless it is a very short young life can have that simplicity. of all the many things i have found beautiful and wonderful, mary was the most wonderful to me, she is in my existence like a sunlit lake seen among mountains, of all the edges by which life has wrought me she was the keenest. nevertheless she was not all my life, nor the form of all my life. for a time after her death i could endure nothing of my home, i could not bear the presence of your mother or you, i hated the possibility of consolation, i went away into italy, and it was only by an enormous effort that i could resume my interest in that scheme of work to which my life is given. but it is manifest i still live, i live and work and feel and share beauty....
it seems to me more and more as i live longer, that most poetry and most literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and recuperations of life as we live it to-day. it is the expression of life under cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who loved and hated more naïvely, aged sooner and died younger than we do. solitary persons and single events dominated them as they do not dominate us. we range wider, last longer, and escape more and more from intensity towards understanding. and already this astounding blow begins to take its place among other events, as a thing strange and terrible indeed, but related to all the strangeness and mystery of life, part of the universal mysteries of despair and futility and death that have troubled my consciousness since childhood. for a time the death of mary obscured her life for me, but now her living presence is more in my mind again. i begin to see that it is the reality of her existence and not the accidents of her end that matter most. it signifies less that she should have flung out of life when it seemed that her living could only have meant disaster to herself and to all she loved, than that all her life should have been hampered and restricted. through all her life this brave and fine and beautiful being was for the most part of her possibilities, wasted in a splendid setting, magnificently wasted if you will, but wasted.
