DIVERSIONS OF THE ANCHORITE
"He shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh.... And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon Joseph's hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck; and he made Joseph to ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried before him:—'Bow the knee!'... And in the plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls."
7.
Diversions of the Anchorite
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The literary artist plays, I had said, with such ideas as he personally finds diverting.... But at this point criticism, remote but decisive, dwelt feelingly, and with, I believe, a tinge of imaginative embellishment, upon the miseries of housekeeping in establishments wherein people never could manage to be on time for their meals. For I seemed to have written through and blotted out another entire, bright, irretrievable afternoon: and rising, prior to a brief venturing into the society of human beings, I wondered how the poetically favored simile of the life of a galley-slave could ever have occurred to, of all persons, some writer or another, as representing thralldom....
After supper I returned to the library: and there—with the artificial aid of electricity now, somehow symbolically, replacing the true sun,—I resumed the quest of my epilogue....
To the one side, as I had pointed out, the artist seeks to divert himself with the ideas which he, whether or no he absolutely and crudely "believes in them," does personally find diverting. This is the game he chooses to play: it is the game with which, at any cost, he intends to amuse himself. And considering all things, I was really afraid that when Mr. Joseph Conrad talked about the artist being prompted by "an obscure inner necessity," we overheard the resort of a pricking conscience to pleonasm. There is nothing particularly "obscure" about our general human unwillingness to be bored: and the artist evades his boredom by playing at his art. That seemed to me all there was to it.
Let us excogitate, as a most pregnant example,—I said, with the pedantic touch befitting graver issues,—the famous case of Joseph Hergesheimer....
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