inkled on life, as you shake sugar out on to a pudding--it is just a
power of disentangling things; we suffer most of us from finding life too
complicated--we don't understand it--it's a mass of confused impressions.
Well, the artist puts it all in order, isolates the important things, makes
the values distinct--he helps people to feel clearly--that's his only use.
And then, if he succeeds, there come silly flatteries and adorations--until
he gets to feel as if he were handing down pots of jam and bottles of wine
from a high shelf out of reach--until he grows to believe that he put them
there, when he only found them there. It's a dreadful thing for an artist
never to succeed at all, because then his life appears the most useless
business conceivable; but it is almost a worse thing to get to depend upon
success--and it is undeniably pleasant to be a personage, to cause a little
stir when you enter a room, to find that people know all about you and like
meeting you, and saying they have met you. I never had any of that: and I
have sometimes found myself with successful writers who made me thank God I
couldn't write--such complacency, such lolling among praise, such vexation
at not being deferred to! The best fate for a man is to be fairly
successful, and to be at the same time pretty severely criticised. That
keeps him modest, while it gives him a degree of confidence that he is
doing something useful. The danger is of drifting right out of life into
unreal civilities and compliments, which you don't wholly like and yet
can't do without. The fact is that writing doesn't generally end in very
much happiness, except perhaps the happiness of work. That's the solid part
of it really, and no one can deprive you of that, whatever happens."

XL

OF WASTE

We were discussing Keats and his premature death. Someone had said that,
beside being one of the best, he was also one of the most promising of
poets; and Father Payne had remarked that reading Keats's letters made him
feel more directly in the presence of a man of genius than any other book
he knew. Kaye had added that the death of Keats seemed to him the most
ghastly kind of waste, at which Father Payne had smiled, and said that that
presupposed that he was knocked out by some malign or indifferent force.
"It is possible--isn't it?" he added, "that he was needed elsewhere and
summoned away." "Then why was he so elaborately tortured first?" said Kaye.
"Well," said Fath