To feel the full force of his loss, my reader must remember that
around the childhood of Robert, which he was fast leaving behind
him, there had gathered no tenderness--none at least by him
recognizable as such. All the women he came in contact with were
his grandmother and Betty. He had no recollection of having ever
been kissed. From the darkness and negation of such an
embryo-existence, his nature had been unconsciously striving to
escape--struggling to get from below ground into the sunlit
air--sighing after a freedom he could not have defined, the freedom
that comes, not of independence, but of love--not of lawlessness,
but of the perfection of law. Of this beauty of life, with its
wonder and its deepness, this unknown glory, his fiddle had been the
type. It had been the ark that held, if not the tables of the
covenant, yet the golden pot of angel's food, and the rod that
budded in death. And now that it was gone, the gloomier aspect of
things began to lay hold upon him; his soul turned itself away from
the sun, and entered into the shadow of the under-world. Like the
white-horsed twins of lake Regillus, like Phoebe, the queen of skyey
plain and earthly forest, every boy and girl, every man and woman,
that lives at all, has to divide many a year between Tartarus and
Olympus.
For now arose within him, not without ultimate good, the evil
phantasms of a theology which would explain all God's doings by low
conceptions, low I mean for humanity even, of right, and law, and
justice, then only taking refuge in the fact of the incapacity of
the human understanding when its own inventions are impugned as
undivine.
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