rtistic fangs to fasten on. Depend on it, there
were plenty of decent original notions seething behind yon marble
brow. Why didn't our William use them? He was too lazy. And so am I.
It is easier to give a new twist to somebody else's story that you
take readymade than to perform that highly-specialised form of skilled
labor which consists in giving artistic coherence to a story that you
have conceived roughly for yourself. A literary gentleman once hoisted
a theory that there are only thirty-six possible stories in the world.
This--I say it with no deference at all--is bosh. There are as many
possible stories in the world as there are microbes in the well-lined
shelves of a literary gentleman's "den." On the other hand, it is
perfectly true that only a baker's dozen of these have got themselves
told. The reason lies in that bland, unalterable resolve to shirk
honest work, by which you recognise the artist as surely as you
recognise the leopard by his spots. In so far as I am an artist, I
am a loafer. And if you expect me, in that line, to do anything but
loaf, you will get the shock your romantic folly deserves. The only
difference between me and my rivals past and present is that I have
the decency to be ashamed of myself. So that if you are not too
bemused and bedevilled by my "brilliancy" to kick me downstairs, you
may rely on me to cheerfully lend a foot in the operation. But, while
I have my share of judicial vindictiveness against crime, Im not going
to talk the common judicial cant about brutality making a Better Man
of the criminal. I havent the slightest doubt that I would thieve
again at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile be so good as to listen
to the evidence on the present charge.

In the December after I was first cast ashore at Holyhead, I had to go
down to Dorsetshire. In those days the more enterprising farm-laborers
used still to annually dress themselves up in order to tickle the
gentry into disbursing the money needed to supplement a local-minimum
wage. They called themselves the Christmas Mummers, and performed
a play entitled Snt George. As my education had been of the typical
Irish kind, and the ideas on which I had been nourished were precisely
the ideas that once in Tara's Hall were regarded as dangerous
novelties, Snt George staggered me with the sense of being suddenly
bumped up against a thing which lay centuries ahead of the time I
had been born into. (Being, in point of fact, only a matte