rl."

"Thank God!" Ernest remarked with a sigh of relief. "Mighty forces
within me are fashioning the limpid thought. Passion may grip us by the
throat momentarily; upon our backs we may feel the lashes of desire and
bathe our souls in flames of many hues; but the joy of activity is the
ultimate passion."

IX

It seemed, indeed, as if work was to Ernest what the sting of pleasure
is to the average human animal. The inter-play of his mental forces gave
him the sensuous satisfaction of a woman's embrace. His eyes sparkled.
His muscle tightened. The joy of creation was upon him.

Often very material reasons, like stone weights tied to the wings of a
bird, stayed the flight of his imagination. Magazines were waiting for
his copy, and he was not in the position to let them wait. They supplied
his bread and butter.

Between the bread and butter, however, the play was growing scene by
scene. In the lone hours of the night he spun upon the loom of his fancy
a brilliant weft of swift desire--heavy, perfumed, Oriental--interwoven
with bits of gruesome tenderness. The thread of his own life intertwined
with the thread of the story. All genuine art is autobiography. It is
not, however, necessarily a revelation of the artist's actual self, but
of a myriad of potential selves. Ah, our own potential selves! They are
sometimes beautiful, often horrible, and always fascinating. They loom
to heavens none too high for our reach; they stray to yawning hells
beneath our very feet.

The man who encompasses heaven and hell is a perfect man. But there are
many heavens and more hells. The artist snatches fire from both. Surely
the assassin feels no more intensely the lust of murder than the poet
who depicts it in glowing words. The things he writes are as real to him
as the things that he lives. But in his realm the poet is supreme. His
hands may be red with blood or white with leprosy: he still remains
king. Woe to him, however, if he transcends the limits of his kingdom
and translates into action the secret of his dreams. The throng that
before applauded him will stone his quivering body or nail to the cross
his delicate hands and feet.

Sometimes days passed before Ernest could concentrate his mind upon his
play. Then the fever seized him again, and he strung pearl on pearl,
line on line, without entrusting a word to paper. Even to discuss his
work before it had received the final brush-strokes would have seemed
indecent to