Lewis shook his head.
"Because, to put it in unmistakable English, they had something on their chest, and they had to get it off. Irving wrote to get away from life. Hawthorne never wrote to get away from life,—he wrote himself into it forever and forever."
Leighton paused to get his cigar well alight.
"And now," he went on, "we come to the eternal crux. Which is beauty? Irving's placid pictures of light, or Hawthorne's dark portrayals of the varying soul of man?" He turned to Lewis. "What's your idea of a prude?"
"A prude," stammered Lewis—"why a prude's a person with an exaggerated idea of modesty, isn't it?"
"Bah!" said Leighton, "you are as flat as a dictionary. A prude is a far more active evil than that. A prude, my boy, is one who has but a single eye, and that in the back of his head, and who keeps his blind face set toward nature. If he would be content to walk backward, the world would get along more easily, and would like him better the farther he walked. The reason the live world has always hated prudes is that it's forever being stumbled on by them. Your prude clutches Irving to the small of his back and cries, 'This alone is beauty!' But any man with two eyes looks and answers, 'You are wrong; this is beauty alone.'
"And now do you see where we've come out? To make a thing of beauty alone is to bring a flash of joy to a hard-pressed world. But joy is never a force, not even an achievement. It's merely an acquisition. It isn't alive. The man who writes on paper or in stone one throbbing cry of the soul has lifted the world by the power of his single arm. He alone lives. And it is written that you shall know life above all the creatures that are in sea and land and in the heavens above the earth by this sign: sole among the things that are, life is its own source and its own end."
Leighton stopped.
"You see now," he added, "why half of me is sorry that it let the other half smash up that cast. What claim has a puny person against one flicker of eternal truth?"
"Yes," said Lewis, slowly, "I see. I can follow your logic to the very end. I can't answer it. All I know is that I myself—I couldn't have paid the price, nor—nor let Vi pay it."