O.W. Incidentally; never intentionally. If they are, they remain incomplete. The artist’s mission is to live the complete life: success, as an episode (which is all it can be); failure, as the real, the final end. Death, analysed to its resultant atoms—what is it but the vindication of failure: the getting rid for ever of powers, desires, appetites, which have been a lifelong embarrassment? The poet’s noblest verse, the dramatist’s greatest scene deal always with death; because the highest function of the artist is to make perceived the beauty of failure. R.R. But have Scotsmen of genius been any more successful, in a wordly sense, than others? I seem to remember a few who failed rather handsomely. O.W. Possibly. Providence is sometimes kinder to us than we are ourselves. But never was there a Scotsman of genius who survived his youth, who was not fatally compromised by his nationality. To fail and to die young is the only hope for a Scotsman who wishes to remain an artist. When, at the end of the eighteenth century, Scotland produced her second great writer of genius, she inspired him to a terrible betrayal (for which the tradespeople of literature still praise him)—to break his art on the wheel of commercial rectitude, to write books which became worse and worse, in order to satisfy his creditors! In Dante’s _Purgatorio_ there is nothing to equal the horror of it. But he succeeded; and Scotland, in consequence, is proud of him. I see by your faces that you all know the man I mean: one does not have to name him. Think of unhappy Sir Walter, writing his transcendent pot-boilers for no other reason than to wipe out bankruptcy! Bankruptcy, that beneficent fairy, who presents to all who trust her with their insolvency five, ten, fifteen, sometimes even nineteen shillings in the pound of what they owe to their creditors—to those usurious ones whose extortionate demands, recognized in other branches of the law, here get turned down. How much did she give me, Robbie? R.R. An extension of time, Oscar. She hasn’t done with you yet. O.W. No; she does not dismiss the lover from her embraces while she has any hope of securing the restoration of his balance, or of discovering some deeper stain in his character. What touching devotion! She is the romantic figure of the money-market. But I believe—or at least I tell myself—that fewer Scotsmen go bankrupt than any other nationality. It is not, however, merely monetary success which seduces them; success, in all its aspects, has for them a baleful attraction. They succumb to it intellectually, morally, spiritually. On that Carlyle wrecked his chances of producing a permanent work of art greater than his _French Revolution_. ALL. Carlyle?