How had Shakespeare and these clever fellows discovered their great art? Why should not he create a school? These fellows—Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Carlyle, Meredith, Sterne, and the rest—they had been just real live men, needing their dinner, sleeping o’ nights, fighting their way to fame year after year, rebuffed, sneered at, ordinary human flesh—without half his chances. What was the trick that they had discovered?
Ay; what the key to their wizardry?
These fellows, the big ones, had never fretted their souls with all these frets of style, of art for art’s sake, of their rating by jabbering classifiers in the eternities. Whilst he—he had wasted the years on such tom-follies. Nay, in expressing themselves they had created style. They had had something deeper than style. What was it?
There was something deep down in the heart of things that made their work live. Some mystic sense——
By heavens, it was mysticism!
He would get up mysticism—read it up at the libraries. He would write mysticism into his work——
He shivered.
In the curio shop, a fool of a Jap had drawn a sharp dagger from its sheath that morning—he hated knives and edged tools.
God! how cold it was!
He suddenly remembered——