“That effect now, those reeking gin lights on that beastly dirty head, and the corpse lights are like a lot of writers’ work, no one can pass it by, it has a power to grasp and hold you, that cleaner things don’t have, and such power means genius, don’t you think? Power strong enough, I mean, to stoop a fellow’s mind and nose low enough to batten on corruption? If the corruption wasn’t made worth examining, one would only pass on, with a kick at the seething mass. Instead of that, one looks and spits, and looks and spits again, but keeps looking and finally settles down to enjoy oneself and then a fellow gets enervated and unmanned before he knows what he is about. He sees the pitiless truth of things, of course, but he loses everything else—the result is very limiting when one thinks of it. Battening on certain books,” went on Brydon after a pause, “was the beginning of it, I think, then rottenness smells sweet after a time, and a fellow gets curious and wants to exploit on his own account. I did all sorts of things first, I tried trees, sun, shade, moonlight; I walked blisters on my feet, I worked in the sweat of my brow, but nothing would still the brutal throbbing, and I went mad one day in that maddening city. Art wasn’t worth a straw to save me. I made a beast of myself, the cheap sort of beast that I had funds for, and—here is the result!” “Well, you’re a sorry object, it must be confessed!” “But that’s not the worst either—do you know I have altogether lost the way to work; I can do nothing. Now some fellows can go down in the gutter one day and mount up amongst the gods the next without turning a hair; it beats me.” “It’s a good deal a question of nationality,” said Strange, “Englishmen as a rule can’t do complete work while they’re mud-larking; French fellows often can; just as no decent bourgeois John Bull has it in him to write tons of magnificent filth on a sort of principle. The fact is, no fellow of your temperament has any business to wallow in modern French realism, you haven’t tone enough. I felt certain this would happen, but you had to take your chance with your betters, and no doubt the experience hasn’t been all loss. I am sorry for you all the same; you’ll find your repentance a darned sight bitterer than the delirium was sweet. That is my experience anyway, and it will go harder with you; your health, you see, can’t stand it.” “It can’t, which makes me the bigger fool. To think of my work being knocked on the head, and to so little purpose! Especially,” he added naïvely, “when one has to do that sort of thing on the cheap.”