"I will come with you," said the Childe, a second time, and she said softly enough, inclining her head in what might have been a dutiful way, "Come then."
And she drew him on, over and under the threshold of the standing stones, and his horse called out in alarm, but he stepped on unhearing. And although the stones seemed simple enough in the midst of the moor, which seemed vaguely to stretch on behind as it had before, he found it was no such thing, for beyond the lintel was a descending track, winding and winding, between banks of sweetly scented flowers he had never seen or dreamed of, blowing soft dust at him from their huge throats, and lit by a light neither of day nor of night, neither of sun nor of moon, neither bright nor shadowy, but the even perpetual unchanging light of that kingdom…
CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE
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.