tioned that he was going into the
country and would be there for some time. He then looked at his watch,
exclaimed at the hour, paid the waiter, and went away with me to
dinner. Soames remained at his post of fidelity to the glaucous witch.

"Why were you so determined not to draw him?" I asked.

"Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn't exist?"

"He is dim," I admitted. But my mot juste fell flat. Rothenstein
repeated that Soames was non-existent.

Still, Soames had written a book. I asked if Rothenstein had read
"Negations." He said he had looked into it, "but," he added crisply,
"I don't profess to know anything about writing." A reservation very
characteristic of the period! Painters would not then allow that any
one outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting.
This law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the
summit of Fuji-yama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than
painting were not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who
practiced them, the law tottered--the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did
not hold good. Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book
without warning you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one
is a better judge of literature than Rothenstein; but it wouldn't have
done to tell him so in those days, and I knew that I must form an
unaided judgment of "Negations."

Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face would have
been for me in those days an impossible act of self-denial. When I
returned to Oxford for the Christmas term I had duly secured
"Negations." I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my
room, and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about, I
would say: "Oh, it's rather a remarkable book. It's by a man whom I
know." Just "what it was about" I never was able to say. Head or tail
was just what I hadn't made of that slim, green volume. I found in the
preface no clue to the labyrinth of contents, and in that labyrinth
nothing to explain the preface.

Lean near to life. Lean very near--
nearer.

Life is web and therein nor warp nor
woof is, but web only.

It is for this I am Catholick in church
and in thought, yet do let swift Mood weave
there what the shuttle of Mood wills.

These were the opening phrases of the preface, but those which followed
were less easy to understand. Then came "Stark: A Conte," about a
midinette