I would even think
it possible to be sensitive without neurasthenia, to be sympathetic
without insanity, to be alive to all the winds that blow without getting
influenza. God forbid that our Letters and our Arts should decade into
Beardsleyism; but between that and their present "health" there lies full
flowering-point, not yet, by a long way, reached.
To flower like that, I suspect, we must see things just a little more--as
they are!
1905-1912.
THE WINDLESTRAW
A certain writer, returning one afternoon from rehearsal of his play, sat
down in the hall of the hotel where he was staying. "No," he reflected,
"this play of mine will not please the Public; it is gloomy, almost
terrible. This very day I read these words in my morning paper: 'No
artist can afford to despise his Public, for, whether he confesses it or
not, the artist exists to give the Public what it wants.' I have, then,
not only done what I cannot afford to do, but I have been false to the
reason of my existence."
The hall was full of people, for it was the hour of tea; and looking
round him, the writer thought "And this is the Public--the Public that my
play is destined not to please!" And for several minutes he looked at
them as if he had been hypnotised. Presently, between two tables he
noticed a waiter standing, lost in his thoughts. The mask of the man's
professional civility had come awry, and the expression of his face and
figure was curiously remote from the faces and forms of those from whom
he had been taking orders; he seemed like a bird discovered in its own
haunts, all unconscious as yet of human eyes.
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