his own experiences, of rows of gaslit faces, and of a friendly
helpful voice that said, "Speak up?"

Of course this was what happened to every intelligent contemporary,
this encounter with ideas, this restatement and ventilation of the
old truths and the old heresies. Only in this way does a man make a
view his own, only so does he incorporate it. These are our real
turning points. The significant, the essential moments in the life
of any one worth consideration are surely these moments when for the
first time he faces towards certain broad ideas and certain broad
facts. Life nowadays consists of adventures among generalizations.
In class-rooms after the lecture, in studies in the small hours,
among books or during solitary walks, the drama of the modern career
begins. Suddenly a man sees his line, his intention. Yet though we
are all of us writing long novels--White's world was the literary
world, and that is how it looked to him--which profess to set out
the lives of men, this part of the journey, this crucial passage
among the Sphinxes, is still done--when it is done at all--slightly,
evasively. Why?

White fell back on his professionalism. "It does not make a book.
It makes a novel into a treatise, it turns it into a dissertation."

But even as White said this to himself he knew it was wrong, and it
slid out of his thoughts again. Was not this objection to the play
of ideas merely the expression of that conservative instinct which
fights for every old convention? The traditional novel is a love
story and takes ideas for granted, it professes a hero but presents
a heroine. And to begin with at least, novels were written for the
reading of heroines. Miss Lydia Languish sets no great store upon