Page:Arthur Machen - The Hill of Dreams.djvu/236

THE HILL OF DREAMS desire for the fine art, had in it something of the inhuman, and dissevered the enthusiast from his fellow-creatures. It was possible that the barbarian suspected as much, that by some slow process of rumination he had arrived at his fixed and inveterate hatred of all artists. It was no doubt a dim unconscious impression, by no means a clear reasoned conviction; the average Philistine, if pressed for the reasons of his dislike, would either become inarticulate, ejaculating 'faugh' and 'pah' like an old-fashioned Scots Magazine, or else he would give some imaginary and absurd reason, alleging that all 'littery men' were poor, that composers never cut their hair, that painters were rarely public-school men, that sculptors couldn't ride straight to hounds to save their lives, but clearly these imbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the average man hated the artist from a deep instinctive dread of all that was strange, uncanny, alien to his nature; he gibbered, uttered his harsh, semi-bestial 'faugh,' and dismissed Keats to his gallipots from much the same motives as usually impelled the black savage to dismiss the white man on an even longer journey.

Lucian was not especially interested in this hatred of the barbarian for the maker, except 226