business. The attitude of his acquaintances towards this inexhaustible
entertainer varied according to his presence or absence between
indifference and terror. It was frightful to think of a man's brain
being stocked with such inexpressibly profitless treasures. It was like
visiting some imposing British Museum and finding its galleries and
glass cases filled with specimens of London mud, of common mortar, of
broken walking-sticks and cheap tobacco. Years afterwards I discovered
that this intolerable prosaic bore had been, in fact, a poet. I learnt
that every item of this multitudinous information was totally and
unblushingly untrue, that for all I knew he had made it up as he went
along; that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that
the rival tradesmen and Mr. Whiteley were creatures of the poet's brain.
Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so
circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely purposeless a liar. With him
it must have been a case of art for art's sake. The joke sustained so
gravely through a respected lifetime was of that order of joke which is
shared with omniscience. But what struck me more cogently upon
reflection was the fact that these immeasurable trivialities, which had
struck me as utterly vulgar and arid when I thought they were true,
immediately became picturesque and almost brilliant when I thought they
were inventions of the human fancy. And here, as it seems to me, I laid
my finger upon a fundamental quality of the cultivated class which
prevents it, and will, perhaps, always prevent it from seeing with the
eyes of popular imagination. The merely educated can scarcely ever be
brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When
they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested,
but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the
street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be
interested. But to common and simple people this world is a work of art,
though it is, like many great works of art, anonymous. They look to life