beat death down upon his knees, kill death utterly, and fix eternity with the grappling-hooks of his own art. His life is soul-hydroptic with a quenchless thirst for glory, and his spirit tortured by the anguish of possession—the intolerable desire to fix eternally in the patterns of an indestructible form a single moment of man’s living, a single moment of life’s beauty, passion, and unutterable eloquence, that passes, flames and goes, slipping for ever through our fingers with time’s sanded drop, flowing for ever from our desperate grasp even as a river flows and never can be held. This is the artist, then—life’s hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave—and to do these things, to get the reward for which he thirsts, with his own immortality to beat and conquer life, enslave mankind, utterly to possess and capture beauty he will do anything, use anything, destroy anything—be ruthless, murderous and destructive, cold and cruel and merciless as hell to get the thing he wants, achieve the thing he values and must do or die.
He is at once life’s monstrous outcast and life’s beauty-drunken lover, man’s bloody, ruthless, pitiless and utterly relentless enemy, and the best friend that mankind ever had: a creature compact of the most selfish, base, ignoble, vicious, cruel and unrighteous passions that man’s life can fathom or the world contain, and a creature whose life with all its toil and sweat and bitter anguish is the highest, grandest, noblest, and the most unselfish, the most superbly happy, good and fortunate life that men can know, or any man attain. He is the tongue of his unuttered brothers, he is the language of man’s buried heart, he is man’s music and life’s great discoverer, the eye that sees, the key that can unlock, the tongue that will express the buried treasure in the hearts of men, that all men know and that no man has a language for—and at the end he is his father’s son, shaped from his father’s earth of blood and sweat and toil and bitter agony: he is at once, therefore, the parent and the son of life, and in him life and all man’s nature are compact; he is most like man in his very differences, he is what all men are and what not one man in a million ever is; and he has all, knows all, sees all that any man on earth can see and hear and know.
This knowledge came to him that morning as he read the play that he had written to his two friends: as he went on with his reading, and felt with a proud triumphant joy and happiness the sense of their devotion, his voice grew strong and confident, the scenes and words and people of the play began to flame and pulse and live with his own passion—
