The anthropocentric fallacy seems still strong
at the heart of our poetasters (one need not
use the name in any offensive sense), and I
never cease to resent it. If we are to insist
that Nature must reserve her supreme sym-
pathy for Man — ^Man who of all creatures has
most outrageously violated her ! — surely we
may rather imagine her as seeking to console
his sorrow by beauty than as desiring to heighten
his bitterness by rigour.
But what is Man anyhow that Nature should
be mindful of him ? There has not in fact been
even coincidence to flatter the fallacy this year,
for the belated spring has broken out at last in
an incomparable efflorescence of splendour. Let
us be glad ! It were no comfort for Nature to



120 IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS

turn all a plumed hearse for my grief. Let me
rather drink of all the heavenly joy that she
can give and learn, if I can, to merge personal
loss in that impersonal flame of glory which
for ever burns up the pains and dross of life,
of all life and not alone of our human life.
Even our poetasters themselves, whom the
agony of the time has called into being, belie
their own faith, and the fragments of song
they shed abroad, their brilliant half-formed
flowers, are mere faint symbols of Nature, a
new incarnation of her purificatory process.
