n at the service of ideas. All his
life he had looked for some great experience, some great satisfaction
and consummation; and he had not found it.

In nineteen-thirteen, with half his life behind him, the opportunist was
still waiting for his supreme opportunity.

Meanwhile his enemies said of him that he snatched.

But he did not snatch. The eyes of his idealism were fixed too steadily
on a visionary future. He merely tried, with a bored and weary gesture,
to waylay the passing moment while he waited. He had put his political
failure behind him and said, "I will be judged as an artist or not at
all." They judged him accordingly and their judgment was wrong.

There was not the least resemblance between Lawrence Stephen as he was
in himself and Lawrence Stephen as he appeared to the generation just
behind him. To conservatives he passed for the leader of the revolution
in contemporary art, and yet the revolution in contemporary art was
happening without him. He was not the primal energy in the movement of
the Vortex. In nineteen-thirteen his primal energies were spent, and he
was trusting to the movement of the Vortex to carry him a little farther
than he could have gone by his own impetus. He was attracted to the
young men of the Vortex because they were not of the generation that had
rejected him, and because he hoped thus to prolong indefinitely his own
youth. They were attracted to him because of his solitary distinction,
his comparative poverty, and his unpopularity. A prosperous,
well-established Stephen would have revolted them. He gave the
revolutionaries the shelter of his _Review_, the support of his name,
and the benefit of his bored and wearied criticism. They brought him in
return a certain homage founded on his admirable appreciation of their
merits and tempered by their sense of his dealings with the past they
abominated.

"Stephen is a bigot," said young Morton Ellis; "he believes in
Swinburne."

Stephen smiled at him in bored and weary tolerance.

He believed in too many things for his peace of mind. He knew that the
young men distrusted him because of his beliefs, and because of his
dealings with the past; because he refused to destroy the old gods when
he made place for the new.

* * * * *

Young Morton Ellis lay stretched out at his ease on the couch in
Stephen's study.

He blinked and twitched as he looked up at his host with half irritated,
half affable a