it, but what will it matter if you do or don’t? You want to lead the artist’s life, to do the artist’s work, to create out of the artist’s materials—what will it matter in the end if you do this, or nothing?”
“You did not always feel so, Frank.”
“No,” said Starwick wearily, “there was a time when I felt differently. There was a time when I felt that the artist’s life was the finest life on earth—the only life I would care to lead.”
“And now?”
“Now—nothing—nothing,” he spoke so quietly that his words were scarcely audible. “It no longer matters…. I go to the Louvre and look at that colossal mountain of junk—up and down those endless corridors hung with the dull or worthless work of thousands of dead men who once felt as I did—that they must create, express the image of their soul—that art and the artist’s life were all that mattered. Now they are dead, their dreary works have been left behind as a kind of useless relic of their agony: in that whole gigantic storage-plant of worthless art—there are just three pictures I should have cared to paint—and I know it’s not in me to paint any of them. I thought I wanted to write plays, but now I feel the same about that, too; among all the thousands of plays I have read or seen, I doubt that there are a dozen which I should have cared to write—and I know now that I could have written none of them…. What does it matter? Why do you goad your spirit and exhaust your mind with these frantic efforts, these useless desires to add another book or play to the mountains of books and plays that have already been written? Why should we break our hearts to add to that immense accumulation of dull, fair, or trivial work that has already been done?” He was silent a moment longer, and then the colour in his ruddy face deepening with excitement, he said in a high, passionate tone: “What is great—what is priceless—what we would give our lives to do—is so impossible—so utterly, damnably impossible! And if we can never do the best—then why do anything?”
For a moment, there returned to the other a memory of the moonlit streets of Cambridge, and of a night when Starwick, drunk with wine and the generous and extravagant enthusiasm of youth, had turned to him and in a voice that rung along the sleeping street, had called him a mighty poet. And he remembered how his own heart had beat hot with hope and joy at the sound of those proud and foolish words, and how he had grasped Starwick’s hand and wrung it with a hard grip of passionate conviction, and told Frank what he believed at that moment with
