n the
Essex flats, a waste of splendid waters and splendid sunsets. So
nature meant to this man Wayne a line of violet roofs and lemon lamps,
the chiaroscuro of the town. He did not think it clever or funny to
praise the shadows and colours of the town; he had seen no other
shadows or colours, and so he praised them--because they were shadows
and colours. He saw all this because he was a poet, though in practice
a bad poet. It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is
nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.

Mr. Wayne's little volume of verse was a complete failure; and he
submitted to the decision of fate with a quite rational humility, went
back to his work, which was that of a draper's assistant, and wrote no
more. He still retained his feeling about the town of Notting Hill,
because he could not possibly have any other feeling, because it was
the back and base of his brain. But he does not seem to have made any
particular attempt to express it or insist upon it.

He was a genuine natural mystic, one of those who live on the border
of fairyland. But he was perhaps the first to realise how often the
boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city. Twenty feet from
him (for he was very short-sighted) the red and white and yellow suns
of the gas-lights thronged and melted into each other like an orchard
of fiery trees, the beginning of the woods of elf-land.

But, oddly enough, it was because he was a small poet that he came to
his strange and isolated triumph. It was because he was a failure in
literature that he became a portent in English history. He was one of
those to whom nature has given the desire without the power of
artistic expression. He had been a dumb poet from his cradle. He might
have been so to his grave, and carried unuttered into the darkness a
treasure of new and sensational song. But he was born under the lucky
star of a single coincidence. He happened to be at the head of his
dingy municipality at the time of the King's jest, at the time when
all municipalities were suddenly commanded to break out into banners
and flowers. Out of the long procession of the silent poets, who have
been passing since the beginning of the world, this one man found
himself in the midst of an heraldic vision, in which he could act and
speak and live lyrically. While the author and the victims alike
treated the whole matter as a silly public charade, this one man, by
taking it seriously, spra