will go on imitating them. When a poet
ceases to be a poet and becomes a centre of corruption, he must go."

Michael said, "How about _us_ when people imitate us? Have we got to
go?"

Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked. "No," he said. "No. We haven't
got to go."

"I don't see how you get out of it."

"I get out of it by doing things that can't be imitated."

There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George Wadham. It
made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break it.

"I say, how about Shakespeare?" he said.

"Nobody, so far, _has_ imitated Shakespeare, any more than they have
_succeeded_ in imitating me."

There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton Ellis as the
imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the forms adopted by
his contemporaries.

"That's all very well, Ellis," said Stephen, "but you aren't the Holy
Ghost coming down out of heaven. We can trace your sources."

"My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost. Nobody ever does
come down out of heaven. You _can_ trace my sources, thank God, because
they're clean. I haven't gone into every stream that swine
like--and--and--and--and--" (he named five contemporary distinctions)
"have made filthy with their paddling."

He went on. "The very damnable question that you've raised, Harrison, is
absurd. You believe in the revolution. Well then, supposing the
revolution's coming--you needn't suppose it, because it's come. We
_are_ the revolution--the revolution means that we've made a clean sweep
of the past. In the future no artist will want to imitate anybody. No
artist will be allowed to exist unless he's prepared to be buried alive
or burned alive rather than corrupt the younger generation with the
processes and the products of his own beastly dissolution.

"That's why violence is right.

"'O Violenza, sorgi, balena in questo cielo
Sanguigno, stupra le albe,
irrompi come incendio nei vesperi,
fa di tutto il sereno una tempesta,
fa di tutta la vita una bataglia,
fa con tutte le anime un odio solo!'

"There's no special holiness in violence. Violence is right because it's
necessary."

"You mean it's necessary because it's right."

Austen Mitchell spoke. He was a sallow youth with a broad,
flat-featured, British face, but he had achieved an appearance of great
strangeness and distinction by letting his hay-coloured hair grow long
and cultivating two beards instea