always stronger than love.  Your hatred[53] of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped, overgrew, and overshadowed your love of me.  There was no struggle between them at all, or but little; of such dimensions was your hatred and of such monstrous growth.  You did not realise that there was no room for both passions in the same soul:  they cannot live together in that fair carven house.  Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are; by which we can see life as a whole; by which and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations.  Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed love.  But anything will feed hate.  There was not a glass of champagne that you drank, not a rich dish that you ate of in all those years, that did not feed your hate and make it fat.  So to gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money, carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequences.  If you lost, the loss would not, you fancied, be yours.  If you won, yours, you knew, would be the exultation and the advantages of victory.

Hate blinds people.  You were not aware of that.  Love can read the writing on the remotest star, but hate so blinded you that you could see no further than the narrow, walled in, and already lust-withered garden of your common desires.  Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect in your character, was entirely the result of the hate that lived in you.  Subtly, silently, and in secret, hate gnawed at your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant, till you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and the most petty aims.  That faculty in you which love would have fostered, hate poisoned and paralysed.

The idea of your being the object of a terrible quarrel between your father and a man of my position seemed to delight you.

You scented the chance of a public scandal and flew to it.  The prospect of a battle in which you would be safe delighted you.

You know what my art was to me, the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world, the great passion of my life, the love to which all other loves were as marsh water to red wine, or the glow worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon....  Don’t you understand now that your lack of imagination was the one really fatal defect of your character?  What you had to do was quite simple, and quite clear before you; but hate had blinded you, and you could see nothing.

Life is quite lovely to you.  And yet, if you are wise, and wish to find life much lovelier still, and in a different manner you will let the reading of this terrible letter—­for such I know it is—­prove to you as important a crisis and turning point of your life as the writing of it is to me.  Your pale face used to flush easily with wine or pleasure.  If, as you read what is here written, it from time to time becomes scorched, as though by a furnace blast, with shame, it will be all the better for you.  The supreme vice is shallowness.  Whatever is realised is right.