It was clearly this which caused him to feel so much like God when they were about. Glad enough, as any man might be, of that discovery, it did not set his mind at rest. He felt that he ought rather to be humbled than elated. And he went to work at once to be so, saying to himself: “I am just, perhaps, a little nearer to the Creative Purpose than the rest of the world--a mere accident, nothing to be proud of; I can’t help it, nothing to make a fuss about, though people will!” For it did seem to him sometimes that the whole world was in conspiracy to make him feel superior--as if there were any need! He would have felt much more comfortable if that world had despised him, as it used to in the old days, for then the fire of his conviction could with so much better grace have flared to heaven; there would have been something fine about a superiority leading its own forlorn hope. But this trailing behind the drums and trumpets of a press and public so easily taken in he felt to be both flat and a little degrading. True, he had his moments, as when his eyes would light on sentences like this (penned generally by clergymen): “All this talk of art is idle; what really matters is morals.” Then, indeed, his spirit would flame, and after gazing at “is morals” with flashing eye and curling lip, and wondering whether it ought to have been “are morals,” he would say to whomsoever might happen to be there: “These bourgeois! What do they know? What can they see?” and, without waiting for an answer, would reply: “Nothing! Nothing! Less than nothing!” and mean it. It was at moments such as these that he realised how he not only despised, but almost hated, those dense and cocky Philistines who could not see his obvious superiority. He felt that he did not lightly call them by such names, because they really _were_ dense and cocky, and no more able to see things from his point of view than they were to jump over the moon. These fellows could see nothing except from their own confounded view-point! They were so stodgy too; and he gravely distrusted anything static. Flux, flux, and once more flux! He knew by intuition that an artist alone had the capacity for concreting the tides of life in forms that were not deleterious to anybody. For rules and canons he recognised the necessity with his head (including his tongue), but never with his heart; except, of course, the rules and canons of art. He worshipped these; and when anybody like Tolstoi came along and said, “Blow art!” or words to that effect, he hummed like bees caught on a gust of wind. What did it matter whether you had anything to express, so long as you expressed it? That only was “pure æsthetics,” as he often said. To place before the public eye something so exquisitely purged of thick and muddy actuality that it might be as perfectly without direct appeal to-day as it would be two thousand years hence--this was an ambition to which in truth he nearly always attained; this only was great art.