"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 and prosperous hospitable eminent people. But, my dear fellow, don't try to stultify yourself and pretend you don't know what we HAVEN'Tgot. It's bigger than all the rest. Between artists - come!" the Master wound up. "You know as well as you sit there that you'd put a pistol-ball into your brain if you had written my books!"It struck his listener that the tremendous talk promised by him at Summersoft had indeed come off, and with a promptitude, a fulness, with which the latter's young imagination had scarcely reckoned.
His impression fairly shook him and he throbbed with the excitement of such deep soundings and such strange confidences. He throbbed indeed with the conflict of his feelings - bewilderment and recognition and alarm, enjoyment and protest and assent, all commingled with tenderness (and a kind of shame in the participation) for the sores and bruises exhibited by so fine a creature, and with a sense of the tragic secret nursed under his trappings. The idea of HIS, Paul Overt's, becoming the occasion of such an act of humility made him flush and pant, at the same time that his consciousness was in certain directions too much alive not to swallow - and not intensely to taste - every offered spoonful of the revelation. It had been his odd fortune to blow upon the deep waters, to make them surge and break in waves of strange eloquence. But how couldn't he give out a passionate contradiction of his host's last extravagance, how couldn't he enumerate to him the parts of his work he loved, the splendid things he had found in it, beyond the compass of any other writer of the day? St. George listened a while, courteously; then he said, laying his hand on his visitor's: "That's all very well; and if your idea's to do nothing better there's no reason you shouldn't have as many good things as I - as many human and material appendages, as many sons or daughters, a wife with as many gowns, a house with as many servants, a stable with as many horses, a heart with as many aches." The Master got up when he had spoken thus - he stood a moment - near the sofa looking down on his agitated pupil. "Are you possessed of any property?" it occurred to him to ask.
"None to speak of."
"Oh well then there's no reason why you shouldn't make a goodish income - if you set about it the right way. Study ME for that -study me well. You may really have horses."
Paul sat there some minutes without speaking. He looked straight before him - he turned over many things. His friend had wandered away, taking up a parcel of letters from the table where the roll of proofs had lain. "What was the book Mrs. St. George made you burn - the one she didn't like?" our young man brought out.
"The book she made me burn - how did you know that?" The Master looked up from his letters quite without the facial convulsion the pupil had feared.
"I heard her speak of it at Summersoft."
"Ah yes - she's proud of it. I don't know - it was rather good.""What was it about?"
"Let me see." And he seemed to make an effort to remember. "Oh yes - it was about myself." Paul gave an irrepressible groan for the disappearance of such a production, and the elder man went on:
"Oh but YOU should write it - YOU should do me." And he pulled up - from the restless motion that had come upon him; his fine smile a generous glare. "There's a subject, my boy: no end of stuff in it!"Again Paul was silent, but it was all tormenting. "Are there no women who really understand - who can take part in a sacrifice?""How can they take part? They themselves are the sacrifice.
