"I read most of the _Apologia_ a month or two back. As you say, Newman stands quite alone in his sincerity and spiritual power, the only orthodox thinker who is not an instance of self-deception resulting from reiterated untruth. All the purest and most beautiful aspects of the old faith seem to group round him. But the lights are almost out on the stage where he poses so magnificently, a rough crowd is spoiling all the scenic illusion, and garish sunbeams are coming in through the roof. "I was moved to tears the day before yesterday by the appearance in this place [Tunbridge Wells] of a pretty face. "There she was, a radiant and triumphant vindication of human nature among the myriad libels on the human form. "I love the wonderful human body. How utterly the most beautiful of imaginable things in its strange dualism; perfect form expressed with infinite subtlety in two mutually supplemental phases. The one--tall, lithe-limbed, and athletic, with its shifting net-work of muscles beneath the clear brown skin, boldly chiselled features and short crisp hair--emblem of strength and swiftness and godlike protection, buoyant and fearless; the other--a harmony of exquisite curves, white and sensitive, and crowned with rippling hair, fulfilled of tender life and wondrous grace--living type of fruitfulness. To say that either deviated from the abstract perfection of form is merely to say the very idea of sex is such a deviation; and is there not a certain divine suggestiveness in this very fact? Their union is perfect Beauty--veils of the great human Sacrament. And all this is faded clean out of modern life. The belief in the body is dead. I believe some of us live and die never knowing the likeness of the human form, just as some of us do without ever seeing the sunrise. "The 'pale Galilean' has banished Beauty; and only here and there, disguised almost beyond recognition, has it ventured with infinite apology to return.... Yet let us not be all unthankful to the pale Galilean and his lessons of suffering; there are too many of us who see in their own instincts the very impress of impossibility to be satisfied, who have to reflect with some bitterness, not '_il faut mourir_,' but '_il faut vivre_' and gather up our scraps and skulk along, hoping, perhaps, some day for a lowly place in some court in the House of Life, if it be only that of a scullion. And then at what a frightful cost have those lessons become part of the world's inheritance! Surely it cannot have been for nothing." * * * * *