his very self that his poems give, and the sharpest
jealousy of his name and fame is enkindled by them. Not to find him there,
his passion, endurance, faith, rapture, despair, is merely a confession of
want in ourselves.' That's not sane, you know--it's the intoxication of the
Corybant! It isn't the man himself we want to fix our eyes upon. He felt
these things, no doubt: but we mustn't worship his raptures--we must
worship what he worshipped. This sort of besotted agitation is little
better than a dancing dervish. The poems are little sparks, struck out from
a scrap of humanity by some prodigious and glorious force: but we must
worship the force, not the spark: the spark is only an evidence, a system,
a symbol if you like, of the force. And then see how utterly the man has
lost all sense of proportion--he has spent hours and days in identifying
with uncommon patience the exact date of these tepid scraps, and he says he
is content to have laid a single stone in the "unamended, unabridged,
authentic temple" of his idol's fame. That seems to me simply degrading:
and then the portentous ass, whose review I read, says that if the editor
had done nothing else, he is sure of an honoured place for ever in the
hierarchy of impeccable critics! And what is all this jabber about--a few
rhymes which a man made when he was feeling a little off colour, and which
he did not think it worth while to publish!

"You mustn't get into this kind of a mess, my boy. The artist mustn't
indulge in emotion for the sake of the emotion. 'The weakness of life,'
says this pompous ass, 'is that it deviates from art!' You might just as
well say that the weakness of food was that it deviated from a well-cooked
leg of mutton! Art is just an attempt to disentangle something, to get at
one of the big constituents of life. It helps you to see clearly, not to
confuse one thing with another, not to be vaguely impressed--the hideous
danger of bookishness is that it is one of the blind alleys into which
people get. These two fellows, the editor and his critic, have got stuck
there: they can't see out: they think their little valley is the end of the
world. I expect they are both of them very happy men, as happy as a man who
goes to bed comfortably drunk. But, good God, the awakening!" Father Payne
relapsed into a long silence, with knitted brows. I tried to start him
afresh.

"But you often tell us to be serious, to be deadly earnest, about our
work?" I said.