spur of the moment.

"I'm not talking of him," said Wilkins with careless cruelty. "He's
restrained. I mean the really imaginative people, the people with
vision, the people who let themselves go. You see now why they are
rotten, why they must be rotten. (No! No! take it away. I'm talking.) I
feel so strongly about this, about the natural and necessary
disreputableness of everybody who produces reputable writing--and for
the matter of that, art generally--that I set my face steadily against
all these attempts that keep on cropping up to make Figures of us. We
aren't Figures, Lady Harman; it isn't our line. Of all the detestable
aspects of the Victorian period surely that disposition to make Figures
of its artists and literary men was the most detestable. Respectable
Figures--Examples to the young. The suppressions, the coverings up that
had to go on, the white-washing of Dickens,--who was more than a bit of
a rip, you know, the concealment of Thackeray's mistresses. Did you know
he had mistresses? Oh rather! And so on. It's like that bust of Jove--or
Bacchus was it?--they pass off as Plato, who probably looked like any
other literary Grub. That's why I won't have anything to do with these
Academic developments that my friend Brumley--Do you know him by the
way?--goes in for. He's the third man down----You _do_ know him. And
he's giving up the Academic Committee, is he? I'm glad he's seen it at
last. What _is_ the good of trying to have an Academy and all that, and
put us in uniform and make out we are Somebodies, and respectable enough
to be shaken hands with by George and Mary, when as a matter of fact we
are, by our very nature, a collection of miscellaneous scandals----We
_must_ be. Bacon, Shakespear, Byron, Shelley--all the stars.... No,
Johnson wasn't a star, he was a character by Boswell.... Oh! great
things come out of us, no doubt, our arts are the vehicles of wonder and
hope, the world is dead without these things we produce, but that's no
reason why--why the mushroom-bed should follow the mushrooms into the
soup, is it? Perfectly fair image. (No, take it away.)"

He paused and then jumped in again as she was on the point of speaking.

"And you see even if our temperaments didn't lead inevitably to
our--dipping rather, we should still have to--_dip_. Asking a writer or
a poet to be seemly and Academic and so on, is like asking an eminent
surgeon to be stringently decent. It's--you see, it's incompatible. Now