passion, no feeling, and without passionate feeling how can one be an
artist? He believes in nothing, loves nothing, not even Bernard Shaw,
and really, on the whole, I don't wonder at his indifference," and he
laughed mischievously.
"And Wells?" I asked.
"A scientific Jules Verne," he replied with a shrug.
"Did you ever care for Hardy?" I continued.
"Not greatly. He has just found out that women have legs underneath
their dresses, and this discovery has almost wrecked his life. He writes
poetry, I believe, in his leisure moments, and I am afraid it will be
very hard reading. He knows nothing of love; passion to him is a
childish illness like measles--poor unhappy spirit!"
"You might be describing Mrs. Humphry Ward," I cried.
"God forbid, Frank," he exclaimed with such mock horror I had to laugh.
"After all, Hardy is a writer and a great landscape painter."
"I don't know why it is," he went on, "but I am always match-making when
I think of English celebrities. I should so much like to have introduced
Mrs. Humphry Ward blushing at eighteen or twenty to Swinburne, who
would of course have bitten her neck in a furious kiss, and she would
have run away and exposed him in court, or else have suffered agonies of
mingled delight and shame in silence.
"And if one could only marry Thomas Hardy to Victoria Cross he might
have gained some inkling of real passion with which to animate his
little keepsake pictures of starched ladies. A great many writers, I
think, might be saved in this way, but there would still be left the
Corellis and Hall Caines that one could do nothing with except bind them
back to back, which would not even tantalise them, and throw them into
the river, a new _noyade_: the Thames at Barking, I think, would be
about the place for them...."
"Where do you go every afternoon?" I asked him once casually.
"I go to Cannes, Frank, and sit in a cafe and look across the sea to
Capri, where Tiberius used to sit like a spider watching, and I think of
myself as an exile, the victim of one of his inscrutable suspicions, or
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