O.W. I may have said the same thing before, Robbie. (It requires a friend to tell one so!) But my explanation, I am sure, will always be different. And yet the one which comes at this moment seems only too obvious. The greatest work of the imagination, for an artist, is to create first himself, then his public. The writing of my plays and my poems was never difficult: because they belonged to me, they came at call. But to make my own public was a labour of Hercules. That is what I did first. The effort lay in the fact that while one appeared to be doing nothing, one was actually prostrated by the exertion. I have known what it is to come back from a week-end—one of those ordeals by tattle which the stately homes of England provide for the passing guest—almost literally at death’s door, from which nothing but hermetic seclusion, until the week-end following, enabled me to escape. One of my doctors called it “heart-strain,” the other “brain-fag.” It was really both. I remember once, on a Monday morning, missing an unreasonably early train, and having to return for four hours to the bosom of a ducal family, when its exhibition hours were over. It was a charnel house: the bones of its skeleton rattled: the ghosts gibbered and moaned. Time remained motionless. I was haunted. I could never go there again. I had seen what man is never meant to see—the sweeping up of the dust on which the footfall of departing pleasure has left its print. There for two days I had been creating my public: the two days given by God to the Jewish and the Christian world for rest; and from that breaking of the sabbath, creator and created were equally exhausted. The breath of life I had so laboriously breathed into their nostrils they were getting rid of again, returning to native clay. And yet how few understand what a life of heroism is that of an artist when he is producing—not his art, but the receptacle which is to contain it. That, dear friends, is why the world is to the artist so tragic. It is always a struggle. The artist may possibly for a while mould the world; but if the world moulds him, he has failed to become an artist, though he may have succeeded in acquiring the Scotch accent. L.H. You spoke just now of the artist creating a public for the appreciation of his work; can he not also create other artists? Would not that be the ideal aim? O.W. Ideal, but impossible. You cannot create an artist; you can only invent one—and it always remains a fiction. Artists—God’s last creation, secret recipients of the Word of Life—continue to create themselves. But invention is often tried as a substitute. I remember, years ago, Hermann Vezin inventing an actress who was to be a second Rachel. For years and years he continued to invent her, telling us what to expect. Then one day he produced her.... R.R. (_after allowing the rhetorical pause its due weight_). What happened? I don’t remember. O.W. On the day he produced her, she ceased to exist.