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By Root 1632 0

a deeper sense of his vocation than Maurice Trevelyan. Yet he was at the same time so self-effacing as to be almost impossible to describe. Put a pen or a manuscript in his hand, and you could not doubt his force of character: about a passage of writing he could not prevent himself from telling the exact truth, however discomforting to the writer; but on any other subject he would happily yield the floor to men twenty years his junior. Even his physical appearance was not easy to capture; he was unremarkably slender, moderately tall, with dark hair receding at the temples, and fine but regular features, save only that the left side of his face looked strangely seared: I do not mean withered or scarred, but rather marked by a fixed pallor, as though he had come too close to a fire whose flames burned cold instead of hot. At any rate I can put it no better than that, and on the evening in question, as we sat gazing into the flames, our occasional silences filled by the creak and crackle of burning coals and the faint snores of the bishop dreaming peacefully on the far side of the hearth, it remained among the topics that had never been raised between us.

Instead we spoke—or rather Maurice spoke, as he would do only when we were alone—of the unwritten poem that, in various guises, had haunted him all his life. Everything good that he had ever done—and he was the most exacting, indeed ruthless critic of his own writing—seemed to him, at certain moments, only the shadow of this other work whose outlines he constantly glimpsed, but whose substance he could never capture. He believed in the community of all true poets through the ages, and sometimes spoke as if all true poems were but fragments of some great ur-poem, or Platonic quintessence of the art; at other times as if our language, in all its richness and beauty, existed in a fallen state, like some great ruin of antiquity, mere broken remnants of a celestial tongue we had once known, and lost; to this end he was fond of quoting Shelley’s remark about the fading coal, or the close of “Kubla Khan”: he had an especial sympathy for poets who had left behind great but unfinished works. He agreed, up to a point, with Pater, that all art aspires to the condition of music, but believed that there was a poem, destined for him and him alone to write, that would be the fulfilment of his life and the perfection of his art, and yet be expressible in ordinary English words, however extraordinary the effect of the whole might be. There were moments, he said, in which he could hear the rhythm of its lines falling as clearly as footsteps passing along a hall, and feel certain that if his inner ear were only a little more acute, he could catch the words before their echoes faded.

To some, this fascination with the unattainable might have become a torment, but Maurice seemed content with his lot. I had often wondered what he would make of the remainder of his life if that one perfect poem were ever to swoop down from the heavens and alight upon his outstretched wrist, but I never quite liked to ask, for it seemed an intrusion upon that privacy which, it sometimes struck me, we shared so intimately without ever mentioning.

We sat, then, watching the coals brighten and fade, which put me in mind, as often, of Shelley; almost simultaneously, Maurice began softly to speak the lines from “Adonais”:

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity . . .

where he ceased, for which I was grateful, for the trampling of the dome always seems to me wanton and wrong. It may be pagan to think so, but to me the beauty is in the whole: the One and the Many, the pure sunlight streaming through stained glass; heaven’s light would be poorer without earth’s shadows. Though perhaps heaven’s light may be as far beyond mere sunlight as the many-coloured dome surpasses a shop window. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”

I did not realise I had spoken the