Romantics About Them
§ 52
The literary artist plays, I repeated, with death. But I had not meant only in a religious way: I had not meant merely that the artist lovingly carves the beads, and polishes the rhetoric of the prayer-books, with which not merely the aged delight to play in turn. And I had not meant, either, to dwell so long upon orthodox religious diversions, since reputable religion is of necessity, like any other popular fashion, an ever-varying unstable affair.
One sect alone—made up of true believers in the everywhere underlying, and the really religious principle, as I interpreted it, of the Biography,—seemed not ever to have varied in its faith. I was thinking of the immodest, impotent, and internecine sect of literary artists. And I could, I believed, best indicate the two main tenets of the literary artist's religion by a rather roundabout approach.
§ 53
For chance, no great while earlier, had condemned me to sit by and listen to a pair of notably successful authors in what, at that time, had seemed a preposterous talk. This talk, a little, troubles memory even now.... For they were not at all heeding me. These two when they forgather effuse a naïve effect of emperors meeting, incognito and with a relished casting off of formality, in a world of underlings. Each one of them is, in fact, too fair a judge of literature to depreciate in anything an admirable book on account of his own name being upon the title-page: and if these two endure each other excellently, it is because each loyally esteems the other to be the next to the most wondrous of American writers, and affects some modest reticence as to the first choice.
The scene was the library of one of them, the period after dinner. The visiting author had but now looked up from where his polychromatic volumes were gaily marshalled (with a perhaps not unpremeditated conspicuousness) toward a shelf across the way, a shelf whereon the host's own books more sombrely convened. The two men had, I repeat, quite recently eaten and had drunk with some thoroughness. They were replete and a bit drowsy. All earthly worries and obligations stood for the moment aloof. Both men had reached their later forties; both were done alike with actual fervors and with real self-distrust; and each, I am certain, is assured, in his private meditations, of a tolerably permanent sort of fame.
"We," said the visitor, the while that he, reflectively, thus looked from the backbones of the one set of books to those of the other, "we have been lucky."
"I wonder?" said the host....
"Yes," stated the first and (upon the whole) the fatter of the two speakers, "for we have got what we wanted, without paying the full price. We might have been poor Dowson or Villon, you know—"