rowness. In
aesthetic matters--and I imagine we both understand that we are dealing
with these--the youngest youth has no tastes; it has merely appetites.
All is fish that comes to its net; if anything, it prefers the gaudier
of the finny tribes; it is only when it becomes sophisticated that its
appetites turn into tastes, and it begins to appreciate the flavor of
that diseased but pearl-bearing species of oyster which we call genius,
because we have no accurate name for it. With the appreciation of this
flavor comes the overpowering desire for it, the incessant and limitless
search for it. To the desire for it whole literatures owe their
continued existence, since, except for the universal genius-hunger of
youth, the classics of almost all languages would have perished long
ago. When indiscriminate and omnivorous youth has explored those vast
and mostly lifeless seas, it has found that the diseased oyster which
bears the pearls is the rarest object in nature. But having once formed
the taste for it, youth will have no other flavor, and it is at this
moment that its danger of hardening into premature age begins. The
conceit of having recognized genius takes the form of a bigoted denial
of its existence save in the instances recognized. This conceit does not
admit the possibility of error or omission in the search, and it does
not allow that the diseased oyster can transmit its pearl-bearing
qualities and its peculiar flavors; so that the attitude of aging youth,
in the stiffening of its tastes, is one of rejection toward all new
bivalves, or, not to be tediously metaphorical, books."

The veteran observer fell silent at this point, and the Easy Chair
seized the occasion to remark: "Yes, there is something in what you say.
But this stiffening of the tastes, this sclerosis of the mind, is hardly
an infectious disease----"

"Ah, but it _is_ infectious," the veteran observer exclaimed, rousing
himself, "infectious as far as the victim can possibly make it so. He
wishes nothing so much as to impart his opinions in all their rigidity
to everybody else. Take your own case, for instance----"

"No, we would rather not," the Easy Chair interposed.

"But you must make the sacrifice," the veteran observer persisted. "You
will allow that you are extremely opinionated?"

"Not at all."

"Well, then, that you are devoutly conscientious in the tenure of your
aesthetic beliefs?"

"Something like that, yes."

"And you cannot den