James’s slobbering and fireworks and sacks of treasure in the holds of Elizabethan sailing ships. Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragonflies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women.
“Another metaphor by Jupiter!” he would exclaim as he said this (which will show the disorderly and circuitous way in which his mind worked and explain why the oak tree flowered and faded so often before he came to any conclusion about Love). “And what’s the point of it?” he would ask himself. “Why not say simply in so many words—” and then he would try to think for half an hour—or was it two years and a half?—how to say simply in so many words what love is. “A figure like that is manifestly untruthful,” he argued, “for no dragonfly, unless under very exceptional circumstances, could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all,” he cried, “why say Bedfellow when one’s already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and leave it?”
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though