babes, and will
you withhold from them their natural sustenance? You asked me the other
night if they're not an immense incentive. Of course they are--there's
no doubt of that!"

Paul turned it over: it took, from eyes he had never felt open so wide,
so much looking at. "For myself I've an idea I need incentives."

"Ah well then, n'en parlons plus!" his companion handsomely smiled.

"_You_ are an incentive, I maintain," the young man went on. "You don't
affect me in the way you'd apparently like to. Your great success is
what I see--the pomp of Ennismore Gardens!"

"Success?"--St. George's eyes had a cold fine light. "Do you call it
success to be spoken of as you'd speak of me if you were sitting here
with another artist--a young man intelligent and sincere like yourself?
Do you call it success to make you blush--as you would blush!--if some
foreign critic (some fellow, of course I mean, who should know what he
was talking about and should have shown you he did, as foreign critics
like to show it) were to say to you: 'He's the one, in this country, whom
they consider the most perfect, isn't he?' Is it success to be the
occasion of a young Englishman's having to stammer as you would have to
stammer at such a moment for old England? No, no; success is to have
made people wriggle to another tune. Do try it!"

Paul continued all gravely to glow. "Try what?"

"Try to do some really good work."

"Oh I want to, heaven knows!"

"Well, you can't do it without sacrifices--don't believe that for a
moment," the Master said. "I've made none. I've had everything. In
other words I've missed everything."

"You've had the full rich masculine human general life, with all the
responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys--all the
domestic and social initiations and complications. They must be
immensely suggestive, immensely amusing," Paul anxiously submitted.

"Amusing?"

"For a strong man--yes."

"They've given me subjects without number, if that's what you mean; but
they've taken away at the same time the power to use them. I've touched
a thousand things, but which one of them have I turned into gold? The
artist has to do only with that--he knows nothing of any baser metal.
I've led the life of the world, with my wife and my progeny; the clumsy
conventional expensive materialised vulgarised brutalised life of London.
We've got everything handsome, even a carriage--we're perfect Philistines