ession, by no means a clear reasoned conviction; the average
Philistine, if pressed for the reasons of his dislike, would either
become inarticulate, ejaculating "faugh" and "pah" like an old-fashioned
Scots Magazine, or else he would give some imaginary and absurd reason,
alleging that all "littery men" were poor, that composers never cut their
hair, that painters were rarely public-school men, that sculptors
couldn't ride straight to hounds to save their lives, but clearly these
imbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the average man hated the artist
from a deep instinctive dread of all that was strange, uncanny, alien to
his nature; he gibbered, uttered his harsh, semi-bestial "faugh," and
dismissed Keats to his gallipots from much the same motives as usually
impelled the black savages to dismiss the white man on an even longer
journey.

Lucian was not especially interested in this hatred of the barbarian for
the maker, except from this point, that it confirmed him in his belief
that the love of art dissociated the man from the race. One touch of art
made the whole world alien, but surely miseries of the civilized man cast
amongst savages were not so much caused by dread of their ferocity as by
the terror of his own thoughts; he would perhaps in his last despair
leave his retreat and go forth to perish at their hands, so that he might
at least die in company, and hear the sound of speech before death. And
Lucian felt most keenly that in his case there was a double curse; he was
as isolated as Keats, and as inarticulate as his reviewers. The
consolation of the work had failed him, and he was suspended in the void
between two worlds.

It was no doubt the composite effect of his failures, his loneliness of
soul, and solitude of life, that had made him invest those common streets
with such grim and persistent terrors. He had perhaps yielded to a
temptation without knowing that he had been tempted, and, in the manner
of De Quincey, had chosen the subtle in exchange for the more tangible
pains. Unconsciously, but still of free will, he had preferred the
splendor and the gloom of a malignant vision before his corporal pains,
before the hard reality of his own impotence. It was better to dwell in
vague melancholy, to stray in the forsaken streets of a city doomed from
ages, to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than to awake to a
gnawing and ignoble torment, to confess that a house of business would
have been more suit