"I don't quite see your point," said Lionel.
"Well," said Roger, moved. "I want to be quite sure of certain elements in myself, before I settle down to a literary life. That life, if it be in the least worthy, is consecrated to the creation of the age's moral consciousness. In the old time a writer was proved by the world before he could begin to create his "ideas of good and evil." Homer never existed, of course, but the old idea of a poet's being blind is very significant. Poets must have been men of action, like the other men of their race. They only became poets when they lost their sight, or ceased, through some wound or sickness, to be efficient in the musters, when, in fact, their lives were turned inwards. Nowadays that is changed, Heseltine. A man writes because he has read, or because he is idle, or greedy, or vicious, or vain, for a dozen different reasons; but very seldom because his whole life has been turned inward by the discipline of action, thought, or suffering. I am not sure of myself. Miss Fawcett's death has brought a lot into my life which I never suspected. I begin to think that a writer without character, without high and austere character, in himself, and in the written image of himself, is a panderer, a bawd, a seller of Christ." He rose from his chair. He paced the room once or twice. "Jacob Boehme was right," he went on. "We are watery people. Without action we are stagnant. If you sit down to write, day after day, for months on end, you can feel the scum growing on your mind." He sat down again, staring at the Correggio. "There," he said, "that is all it is. I sometimes feel that all the thoroughly good artists, like Dürer, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Dante, all of them, sit in judgment on the lesser artists when they die. I think they forgive bad art, because they know how jolly difficult art of any kind is. I don't believe that art was ever easy to anybody, except perhaps to women, whose whole lives are art. But they would never forgive faults of character or of life. They would exact a high strain of conduct, mercilessly. Good God, Heseltine, it seems to me terrible that a man should be permitted to write a play before he has risked his life for another, or for the State."
"Well," said Lionel, picking up his cigarette, which had fallen to the floor, scattering sparks. "Yes." He pressed his forefinger reflectively on each crumb of fire one after the other. "Yes. But look here. I met that French poet fellow, Mongeron, the other day, the day before yesterday. He said that action was unnecessary to the man of thought, since the imagination enabled him to possess all experience imaginatively."
"Yes. I know that pleasant theory. I agree," said Roger. "But only when action has formed the character. I take writing very seriously, but I want to be sure that it is the thing which will bring out the best in me. I am doubtful of that. I am doubtful even whether art of any kind is not an anachronism in this scientific century, when so much is being learned and applied to the bettering of life. As I said the other night, my State is the human mind. If this art, about which I have spilled such a lot of ink, be really a survival, what you call in dissecting-rooms 'a fossil,' then I am not helping my State, but hindering her, by giving all my brains' vitality to an obsolete cause. One feels very clever, with these wise books in one's head; but they don't go down to bed-rock. They don't mean much in the great things of life. They don't help one over a death."
"No," said Lionel reflectively. "I think I see all your points." He made the subject practical at once, feeling a little beyond his depth in ethics. "It would be a very interesting experience for you to go out," he said. "A fine thing, too; for it is very difficult to get a good brain to take up a subject in that particular way. Still, one ought not to waste a good brain like yours in watching tsetses."
"No imaginative work is wasted," said Roger. "The experience would add a great deal to me. I should feel more sure of being able to face the judge after death."
"How about the practice of your art?"
"That will not be hurt by the deepening of my interests."
"Come on out to dinner," said Lionel. "I generally go to Simpson's. We'll go into Committee of Supply. The first thing we shall have to do is to try to get you the job of bottle-washer to somebody's clinic. What I want to do when I get out there is this, Naldrett. I want to get right away into the back of beyond, into the C.F.S., or wherever there is not much chance of the natives having mixed with Europeans. I want to find out if there is any native cure, if any native tribes are immune, as they are to malaria, and whether their cattle, if they have any, are immune, like the game. You will guess that what I want to do is to prepare anti-toxins strong enough to resist the disease at any stage, and also to act as preventives. That's the problem as it seems to me. It may sound a little crazy."
"Is the tsetse immune?" said Roger. "Does anybody know anything about flies? If the tsetse is immune, why could not an anti-toxin be prepared from the tsetse? It would be more than science. It would be equity."