Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/14

Rh Whereas those others try to frame their sense of him, which is small, those flatter him with a whole-hearted imitation, creating little gardens with stick and ink and paper as he creates the world for joy with light.

More minds are capable of an interest in persons than in beauty, as the appetite for gossip and scandal shows. The impressionist theory was bound to catch on; it panders to so common a weakness. "Know thyself!" "Be true to your own experience." Yes, but not because you are you, or it is yours, but because you are not adequate, it cannot suffice, and to realise these limits till they ache is to extend them, throw them off and enlarge your life. The difference of attitude is enormous, far more real than any that can be drawn between romantic and classical or realist and idealist. The artist never does express himself; but, in trying to create objects, a by-product of mannerisms and shortcomings piles up like a heap of shavings, and this distinguishes his work from that of other artists. The poet who is keen about a poem and the poet who is anxious about his reputation are two persons, though like light and darkness they may alternately occupy the same room; one casts the other out. The master draws importance from the masterpiece, not this from him: his glory is a reflex light from its worth.

But do I not in sketching these characters truckle with this vice? A character is formed by a transparent and elastic envelope of limitations like a soap-bubble; it is easy to attribute those iridescent hues to that tegument of defect, but they are due to the form which the energy within supports. This escapes; a slop of soapy water falls; so when life evades, the body caves in and moulders. The hope which is my excuse is that I have focused attention on no slimy limitations but on the shape bestowed by that expansive energy.

Life is impersonal except while prisoned in some alien material, to which it gives as perfectly as possible an 10