n what his jargon means. From Aristotle to William James,
I have dipped into quite a lot of them--Descartes, Berkeley, Kant,
Schopenhauer (the thrice besotted Teutonic ass who said that women
weren't beautiful), for I hate to be thought an ignorant duffer--and I
have never come across in them anything worth knowing, thinking, or
doing that I was not taught at my mother's knee. And as for her, dear,
simple soul, if you had asked her what was the Categorical Imperative
(having explained beforehand the meaning of the words), she would have
said, "The Sermon on the Mount."

Of course, please regard this as a criticism not of the metaphysicians
and the philosophers, but of myself. All these great thinkers have
their niches in the Temple of Fame, and I'm quite aware that the
consensus of human judgment does not immortalise even such an ass as
Schopenhauer, without sufficient reason. All I want to convey to you is
that I am only a plain, ordinary God-fearing, law-abiding Englishman,
and that when young Randall Holmes brought down from Oxford all sorts
of highfalutin theories about everything, not only in God's Universe,
but in the super-Universe that wasn't God's, and of every one of which
he was cocksure, I found my homely self very considerably out of it.

Then--young Randall was a poet. He had won the Newdigate. The subject
was Andrea del Sarto, one of my favourite painters--il pittore senza
errore--and his prize poem--it had, of course, to be academic in
form--was excellent. It said just the things about him which Browning
somehow missed, and which I had always been impotently wanting to say.
And a year or so afterwards--when I praised his poem--he would shrink
in a more than deprecating attitude: I might just as well have extolled
him for seducing the wife of his dearest friend. His later poems, of
which he was immodestly proud--"Sensations Captured on the Wing," he
defined them--left me cold and unsympathetic. So, for these reasons,
the boy and I had drifted apart. Until I had caught him in flagrante
delicto of walking with his arm round the waist of pretty Phyllis
Gedge, I had not seen him to speak to for a couple of months.

He came, however, after dinner, looking very sleek and handsome and
intellectual, and wearing a velvet dinner jacket which I did not like.
After we had gossiped awhile:--

"You said you were very busy?" I remarked.

He flicked off his cigarette ash and nodded.

"What at?"

"War poetry," he