"I voiced for you most plainly and mellifluously the principles of his economy—"
"Yes: I remember your high observations as to Villon and Marlowe. The artist, you argued, is unwilling to be wasted; and he alone manages—sometimes—to perpetuate himself where everybody else perishes. You were quite eloquent about the artist's immortality. Only, I remember too that, toward the end, you admitted a considerable distinction. In art, you cried, it may so happen that the thing which a man makes may endure to be misunderstood and gabbled over, but it is not the man himself. We retain—I am still paying you the handsome tribute of exact quotation,—we retain the Iliad, but oblivion has swallowed Homer so deep that many question if he ever existed at all."
Charteris replied with something of the hasty affability appropriate to dealings with the insane. "Now, my dear man! the whole point was that the artist strives to make something which endures—"
"I know! You explained what he attempts to do: but you did not explain why he should want to do it. You did not explain what he gets out of it,—beyond suggesting, and then retracting the suggestion, that he aspires to a sort of terrestrial immortality. No, Charteris, you explained, in fine, nearly everything connected with books except why an author writes them."
He deliberated this. He said: "Oh, but I must have made that plain. I can most vividly remember elucidating every bit of the universe, and that rather important detail could not well have been ignored."
"Ignored or not, you left it unexplained."
And promptly Charteris settled back in his chair, intent to remedy this omission.
"The author, then, very much as I did, will under provocation become magniloquent, and will say this, that and the other. But every author's real reason for writing is that, if he did not write, he would be bored to death. He writes because—"
Here I stopped him. "No, Charteris! You are too fond of juggling phrases with no better end in view than to get pleasure from your own dexterity. And I happen to be in earnest. Some twenty years and more, you conceive, I have given over, together with health and eyesight, to the writing of the Biography: and I am nowadays, however late in the game, quite honestly and not unnaturally concerned to find out why."
"So, then! at last, you sympathize with your reviewers!"