being surprised and hurt by the crudity and coarseness
of human nature, and for ever bracing themselves to be not as others
are. They would have incurred the anger of Dr. Johnson, and a just
discipline for them would be that they should be cross-examined by the
great bully in presence of a jury of butchers and sentenced accordingly.
The morbid Flaubertian shrinking from reality is to be found to-day even
in relatively robust minds. I was recently at a provincial cinema, and
witnessed on the screen with a friend a wondrously ingenuous drama
entitled "Gold is not All." My friend, who combines the callings of
engineer and general adventurer with that of serving his country, leaned
over to me in the darkness amid the violent applause, and said: "You
know, this kind of thing always makes me ashamed of human nature." I
answered him as Johnsonially as the circumstances would allow. Had he
lived to the age of fifty so blind that it needed a cinema audience to
show him what the general level of human nature really is? Nobody has
any right to be ashamed of human nature. Is one ashamed of one's mother?
Is one ashamed of the cosmic process of evolution? Human nature _is_.
And the more deeply the creative artist, by frank contacts, absorbs that
supreme fact into his brain, the better for his work.

There is a numerous band of persons in London--and the novelist and
dramatist are not infrequently drawn into their circle--who spend so
much time and emotion in practising the rites of the religion of art
that they become incapable of real existence. Each is a Stylites on a
pillar. Their opinion on Leon Bakst, Francis Thompson, Augustus John,
Cyril Scott, Maurice Ravel, Vuillard, James Stephens, E.A. Rickards,
Richard Strauss, Eugen d'Albert, etc., may not be without value, and
their genuine feverish morbid interest in art has its usefulness; but
they know no more about reality than a Pekinese dog on a cushion. They
never approach normal life. They scorn it. They have a horror of it.
They class politics with the differential calculus. They have heard of
Lloyd George, the rise in the price of commodities, and the eternal
enigma, what is a sardine; but only because they must open a newspaper
to look at the advertisements and announcements relating to the arts.
The occasional frequenting of this circle may not be disadvantageous to
the creative artist. But let him keep himself inoculated against its
disease by constant steady plunges into t