ossibility wore on him. He wanted to feel that a book was
coming to something, and if he couldn't feel in reading it that the book
was coming to something he wanted to feel at least that he was. He did
not say it in so many words, but he admitted he did not care very much
in reading for what I had spoken of as a "stream of consciousness." He
wanted a nozzle on it.

I asked him at this point how he felt in reading certain classics. I
brought out quite a nice little list of them, but I couldn't track him
down to a single feeling he had thought of--had had to think of, all by
himself, on a classic. I found he had all the proper feelings about them
and a lot of well-regulated qualifications besides. He was on his guard.
Finally I asked him if he had read (I am not going to get into trouble
by naming it) a certain contemporary novel under discussion.

He said he had read it. "Great deal of power in it," he said. "But it
doesn't come to anything. I do not see any possible artistic sense," he
said, "in ending a novel like that. It doesn't bring one anywhere."

"Neither does one of Keats's poems," I said, "or Beethoven's _Ninth
Symphony_. The odour of a rose doesn't come to anything--bring one
anywhere. It would be hard to tell what one really gets out of the taste
of roast beef. The sound of the surf on the Atlantic doesn't come to
anything, but hundreds of people travel a long way and live in
one-windowed rooms and rock in somebody else's bedroom rocker, to hear
it, year after year. Millions of dollars are spent in Europe to look at
pictures, but if a man can tell what it is he gets out of a picture in
so many words there is something very wrong with the picture."

The P. G. S. of M. gave an impatient wave of his hand. (To be strictly
accurate, he gave it in the middle of the last paragraph, just before we
came to the Atlantic. The rest is Congressional Record.) And after he
had given the impatient wave of his hand he looked hurt. I accordingly
drew him out. He was still brooding on that novel. He didn't approve of
the heroine.

"What was the matter?" I said; "dying in the last chapter?" (It is one
of those novels in which the heroine takes the liberty of dying, in a
mere paragraph, at the end, and in what always has seemed and always
will, to some people, a rather unsatisfactory and unfinished manner.)

"The moral and spiritual issues of a book ought to be--well, things are
all mixed up. She dies indefinitely."

"Most