He was silent for a little, and then he said, "And then, too, there is the great danger of all writers--the feeling that he has the power of giving people what they want, when he ought to remember that he has only the good fortune of expressing what people feel. Art oughtn't to be a thing sprinkled on life, as you shake sugar out on to a pudding--it is just a power of disentangling things; we suffer most of us from finding life too complicated--we don't understand it--it's a mass of confused impressions. Well, the artist puts it all in order, isolates the important things, makes the values distinct--he helps people to feel clearly--that's his only use. And then, if he succeeds, there come silly flatteries and adorations--until he gets to feel as if he were handing down pots of jam and bottles of wine from a high shelf out of reach--until he grows to believe that he put them there, when he only found them there. It's a dreadful thing for an artist never to succeed at all, because then his life appears the most useless business conceivable; but it is almost a worse thing to get to depend upon success--and it is undeniably pleasant to be a personage, to cause a little stir when you enter a room, to find that people know all about you and like meeting you, and saying they have met you. I never had any of that: and I have sometimes found myself with successful writers who made me thank God I couldn't write--such complacency, such lolling among praise, such vexation at not being deferred to! The best fate for a man is to be fairly successful, and to be at the same time pretty severely criticised. That keeps him modest, while it gives him a degree of confidence that he is doing something useful. The danger is of drifting right out of life into unreal civilities and compliments, which you don't wholly like and yet can't do without. The fact is that writing doesn't generally end in very much happiness, except perhaps the happiness of work. That's the solid part of it really, and no one can deprive you of that, whatever happens." XL OF WASTE