e fair face of beauty. He
dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking
smells alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having
dissected and learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to
create beauty itself.

He was so made that he could work only with understanding. He could not
work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and trusting
to chance and the star of his genius that the effect produced should be
right and fine. He had no patience with chance effects. He wanted to
know why and how. His was deliberate creative genius, and, before he
began a story or poem, the thing itself was already alive in his brain,
with the end in sight and the means of realizing that end in his
conscious possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure. On
the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases
that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all
tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable
connotations. Before such he bowed down and marvelled, knowing that they
were beyond the deliberate creation of any man. And no matter how much
he dissected beauty in search of the principles that underlie beauty and
make beauty possible, he was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of
beauty to which he did not penetrate and to which no man had ever
penetrated. He knew full well, from his Spencer, that man can never
attain ultimate knowledge of anything, and that the mystery of beauty was
no less than that of life--nay, more that the fibres of beauty and life
were intertwisted, and that he himself was but a bit of the same
nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and star-dust and wonder.

In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he wrote his essay
entitled "Star-dust," in which he had his fling, not at the principles of
criticism, but at the principal critics. It was brilliant, deep,
philosophical, and deliciously touched with laughter. Also it was
promptly rejected by the magazines as often as it was submitted. But
having cleared his mind of it, he went serenely on his way. It was a
habit he developed, of incubating and maturing his thought upon a
subject, and of then rushing into the type-writer with it. That it did
not see print was a matter a small moment with him. The writing of it
was the culminating act of a long mental process, the drawing together of
sca