You write much - of the Creator - whom you do not nameFather - save in yr Norse analogy. But of the true tale of the Son you say wondrous little - andyet that lies at the Centre of our livingfaith - the Life and Death of God made man, our true Friend and Saviour, the model of our conduct, and our hope, in his Rising from the Dead, of a future life for all of us, without which the failing and manifest injustice of our earthly span would be an intolerable mockery. But I write - like a Sermon-Preacher - which we Women are not - it is Decreed - -fitted to be - and tell you no morethan you must have endlessly - in your wisdom - already cogitated.
And yet - could we have conceived that Sublime Model, that Supreme Sacrifice - if it were not so?
I could adduce against you - the Evidence of your own Lazarus-poem - whose riddling title you must some day expound to me in its mystery. Déjà-Vu or the Second Sight- indeed. How are we to take that? My friend - my companion and I have lately become interested in psychic phenomena - we have attended some locallectures on unusual States of Mind - and Spirit manifestations - we have even been bold enough to sit in at a seance conducted by a Mrs Lees - Now Mrs Lees is convinced that the phenomena of Déjà-Vu- whereby the experient is convincedthat a present experience is only a Repetition of whathas already, perhaps frequently, been lived through before - is Evidence of some circularity of inhuman time - of Another Adjacent World where things eternally are with no change or decay. And that the well-attested Phenomena of Second Sight - the gift of pre-
Vision, or foretelling or prophecy - is another Dipping into thatforever refreshed Continuum. So - in this view yr poem wd seem to be suggesting that dead Lazarus moved in and out of Eternity again - 'from Time to Time" as you wrote in that poem - if I understand you - and now sees Time - -from the perspective of Eternity. It is a conceit worthy of you - and now I come to know you better - his risen vision of the miraculous Nature of the Minute Particulars of Life - the Goat's yellow barredEye - the bread on the Platter with the scaly Fishes waiting for the oven - all these are to you the essence of living,- and it is only to your perplexed narrator that the living-deadman's gaze appears Indifferent - for truly he sees all to have value -All-
Before I met Mrs Lees -I took your Second Sight more generally - as a Prefiguring of that Second Coming we await - little grains of sand shall be sifted and counted, as the hairs on our heads, in the eye of the deadman -
The Son of God speaks not in your poem. But the Roman Scribe who tells the tale - he the census-taker, the collector of minorfacts - is he not amazed despite his own inclinations - despite his Prosaic mental habits of officialdom - by the effect of thepresence of the Man on that small community of believers - who are cheerfully ready to Diefor Him - and as ready to live in penury -" 'tis all one to thee" he writes, puzzled - but we are not puzzled-for He has oped to them the Door of Eternity and they have glimpsed the light within - that illuminates the loaves andfishes - is not that so?
Or am I too Simple? Was He - so loved, so absent, so cruellydead - merely Man?
You have most dramatically presented the Love of Him, - the Need of his Comfort - now Absent - among the women of Lazarus' household - the ceaselessly active Martha and the visionary Mary, each in her way aware of what His Presence once meant - though Martha sees it as household decorum - and Mary sees it as Lost Light - and Lazarus sees - only what he sees - momently -
Oh what a puzzle. Now I come to the end of my clumsy apprentice adumbration of your masterly monologue - have I described the liveliness of Living Truth - or the dramatisation merely - of faith - of Need?
Will you say what you mean? Are you like the Apostle, all things to allmen? Where - where have I led - myself?Tell me - He Lives - -for you
Well, my dear Miss Lamotte, I am tied to the stake and I must stay the course - though in otherrespectsdissimilar enoughfrom Macbeth. I was first relieved to have your letter, and to see that I was notjudged excommunicado and then, on better judgment making, I weighed it for some time, turning it this way and that in case it should after all speak Brimstone and Ashes to me.
And when I came to open it, there was such generosity of spirit, such fervent faith and such subtlety of understanding of what I had written -I mean not only my dubious letter, but my poem on Lazarus. You know how it is, beingyourself apoet - one writes such and such a narrative, and thinks as one goes along - here's a good touch - this concept modifies that - will it not be too obvious to the generality? - too thick an impasto of the Obvious - one has almost a disgust at the too-apparent meaning - and then the general public gets hold of it, andpronounces it at the same time too heartily simple and too loftily incomprehensible - and it is clear only that whatever one had hoped to convey is lost in mists of impenetrability - and slowly it loses its life- in one's own mind, as much as in its readers'.
And then you comealong - with a dashof apparently effortless and casual wisdom - and resuscitate the whole thing - even to your own doubtful question at the end - did He do this - did Lazarus live - did He, the God-man, truly resurrect the dead before Himself triumphing over Death - or was it all only theproduct, asFeuerbachbelieves, of human Desire embodying itself in a Tale -?
You ask me - tell me - He Lives - for you -
Lives - yes - but How? How? Do I truly believe that this Man stept into the charnel house where Lazarus was already corrupt and bade him stand and walk?
Do I truly believe that all this is only figments of hopes and dreams and garbledfolklore, embellished for the credulous by simple people?
We live in an age of scientifichistory - we sift our evidence - we know somewhat about eyewitness accounts and how far it is prudent to entrust ourselvesto them - and of whatthis living-dead-man (I speak of Lazarus, not of his Saviour) saw, or reported or thought, or assured his loving family of what lay beyond the terrible bourn -not a word.
So if I construct a fictive eyewitness account - a credible plausible account - am I lending life to truth with my fiction - or verisimilitude to a colossalLie with my feverish imagination? Do I do as they did, the evangelists, reconstructing the events of the Story in after-time? Or do I do asfalse prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer - like Macbeth's witches - mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of apropheticBooh - telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledgedCali-ban -I nowhere claim my poor bullet-headed brute of a Roman censor as other than mine, a clay mouth to whistle through.
No answer, you will say, your head on one side, considering me, like a wise bird, sharply, and judging me as a prevaricator.
Do you know - the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination. Whatever the absolute Truth-or Untruth-of that old life-in death-Poetry can make that man live for the length of the faith you or any other choose to give to him. I do not claim to bestow Life as He did - on Lazarus - but maybe as Elisha did - who lay on the deadbody - and breathed life into it -
Or as the Poet of the Gospel did-for he was Poet, whatever else - Poet, whether scientific historian or no.
Do you touch at my meaning? When I write I know. Remember that miraculous saying of the boy Keats -I am certain of nothing, but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination -