for them...."

"Where do you go every afternoon?" I asked him once casually.

"I go to Cannes, Frank, and sit in a cafe and look across the sea to
Capri, where Tiberius used to sit like a spider watching, and I think of
myself as an exile, the victim of one of his inscrutable suspicions, or
else I am in Rome looking at the people dancing naked, but with gilded
lips, through the streets at the _Floralia_. I sup with the _arbiter
elegantiarum_ and come back to La Napoule, Frank," and he pulled his
jowl, "to the simple life and the charm of restful friendship."

More and more clearly I saw that the effort, the hard work, of writing
was altogether beyond him: he was now one of those men of genius,
talkers merely, half artists, half dreamers, whom Balzac describes
contemptuously as wasting their lives, "talking to hear themselves
talk"; capable indeed of fine conceptions and of occasional fine
phrases, but incapable of the punishing toil of execution; charming
companions, fated in the long run to fall to misery and destitution.

Constant creation is the first condition of art as it is the first
condition of life.

I asked him one day if he remembered the terrible passage about those
"eunuchs of art" in "La Cousine Bette."

"Yes, Frank," he replied; "but Balzac was probably envious of the
artist-talker; at any rate, we who talk should not be condemned by those
to whom we dedicate our talents. It is for posterity to blame us; but
after all I have written a good deal. Do you remember how Browning's
Sarto defends himself?

"Some good son
Paint my two hundred pictures--let him try."

He did not see that Balzac, one of the greatest talkers that ever lived
according to Theophile Gautier, was condemning the temptation to which
he himself had no doubt yielded too often. To my surprise, Oscar did not
even read much now. He was not eager to hear new thoughts, a little
rebellious to any new mental influence. He had reached his zenith, I
suppose: had begun to fossilise, as men do when they cease to grow.

One day at lunch I questioned him:

"You told me once that you always imagined yourself in the place of
every historic personage. Suppose you had been Jesus, what religion
would you have preached?"

"What a wonderful question!" he cried. "What religion is mine? What
belief have I?

"I believe most of all in personal liberty for every human soul. Each
man ought to do what he likes, to develop as he will. En