ch0d

ch0a: "The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait"
ch0b: "In spite, however, of continued shocks, which drove him from breathless flights"
ch0c: "In their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed"
ch0d: "One night in early spring, standing at the foot of the staircase in the library"
ch0e: "Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artistic economy"
ch0f: "His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified"
ch0g: "In calmer mood the critic in him could not but remark a strange prelude"



[last]



One night in early spring, standing at the foot of the staircase in the library, he said to his friend "I have left the Church." And as they walked home through the streets arm-in-arm he told, in words that seemed an echo of their closing, how he had left it through the gates of Assisi.

ch20: "Cranly, said Stephen, I have left the Church."


Extravagance followed.



The simple history of the Poverello was soon out of mind and he established himself in the maddest of companies.



Joachim Abbas, Bruno the Nolan, Michael Sendivogius, all the hierarchs of initiation cast their spells upon him.



He descended among the hells of Swedenborg and abased himself in the gloom of Saint John of the Cross.



His heaven was suddenly illuminated by a horde of stars, the signature of all nature, the soul remembering ancient days.



Like an alchemist he bent upon his handiwork, bringing together the mysterious elements, separating the subtle from the gross.



For the artist the rhythms of phrase and period, the symbols of word and allusion, were paramount things.



And was it any wonder that out of this marvellous life, wherein he had annihilated and rebuilt experience, laboured and despaired, he came forth at last with a simple purpose-- to reunite the children of the spirit, jealous and long-divided, to reunite them against fraud and principality.



A thousand eternities were to be reaffirmed, divine knowledge was to be re-established.



Alas for Fatuity! as easily might he have summoned a regiment of the winds.



They pleaded their natural pieties-- social limitations, inherited apathy of race, an adoring mother, the Christian fable.



Their treasons were venial only.



Wherever the social monster permitted they would hazard the extremes of heterodoxy, reasons of an imaginative determinant in ethics, of anarchy (the folk), of blue triangles, of the fish-gods, proclaiming in a fervent moment the necessity for action.

cf Aug04? "For every true-born mysticist
A Dante is, unprejudiced,
Who safe at ingle-nook, by proxy,
Hazards extremes of heterodoxy"


His revenge was a phrase and isolation.



He lumped the emancipates together-- Venomous Butter-- and set away from the sloppy neighborhood.






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