The artist, anyway, is not nearly so important as he thinks himself. It’s all poppycock and swagger for Baudelaire to say that a man can live three days without food but not a day without poetry. It may have been true of Baudelaire; it certainly isn’t true of the world in general. In any nation only a comparatively small minority are interested in the arts, and most of those merely want to be amused. If all the artists and writers of a nation were suddenly obliterated by some plague of Egypt, some legitimately vengeful angel, most people would be totally unaware that they had suffered any loss, unless the newspapers made a fuss about it. But let the journeymen bakers go on strike for a fortnight.... If I were a millionaire it would amuse me to go about giving high-minded artists five hundred pounds a year to shut up. The suggestion is not copyright. Our young friend was, of course, filled with numerous high-falutin’ delusions about the supreme importance of art and the dazzling supremacy of artists over the rest of mankind. But he had two fairly sound ideas. One was that the artist should do his job, like any one else, as well as he could, without making too much fuss about it; the other was that knowledge of the arts and practice of any art are chiefly important for sharpening the intelligence and perceptions, extending one’s experience and intensifying life. These objects are not furthered by scandal, preposterous vanity and arrivism. He was therefore perfectly right in feeling a certain amount of contempt for Mr. Shobbe’s guests. The life of Rousseau the Douanier is infinitely more respectable than that of a fashionable portrait-painter, touting socially for orders. * * * * * Elizabeth and George continued their conversation on the bus from Holland Park to Tottenham Court Road. Like most bright young things they abounded in their own sense. As George said, it was perfectly obvious that they were an immense improvement on their predecessors, that they knew exactly how to avoid the lamentable errors and absurdities of former generations, and that they were going to have most interesting and delightful lives. Anybody who has not felt these pleasing delusions at the age of twenty must, I fear, be ranged in George’s category of abject morons. Youth is so much more valuable than experience; it is also far more intelligent. Few things are more astounding and touching than the kindly tolerance of the young for their imbecile elders. For, have no doubts about it, even the greatest minds degenerate annually, and the finest moral character is repulsive at forty. Think of the fire and flash and inspiring genius of young General Bonaparte and the stupid degeneracy of the Emperor who had to retreat ignominiously from Moscow. A nation which relies on the alleged wisdom of sexagenarians is irrevocably degenerate. Attila was only thirty when he sacked sexagenarian Rome—at least, he ought to have been.