Artists -- Fiction; English fiction -- 20th century; Jews -- England -- London -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
Indeed, they both thought there could be no place like London. Once or
twice a week they dined together at the Pot-au-Feu and went on to a
party or to a music-hall or to the cinema, which he adored. He said it
gave him ideas for pictures and that there were often wonderful
momentary pictures thrown on the screen.
"The cinema does what the bad artists have been trying to do for
generations. It is a great relief to have it done by a machine. The
artist need not any more try to be a machine. There is no need for him
now to please the public. He can leave all that to the machine and go
straight for art. The few decent people will follow him, and what more
does he want? Art is not for the fools. . . . Logan was wrong. He
wanted art to go to the people. That is all wrong. The people must
come up to art. When they are sick of the machine, art is there, ready
for them." He added naïvely, "I shall be there, waiting for them."
He loved especially the dramas, when they were not clogged and
obscured with sentimentality. The simple values that governed them,
the triumph of virtue and the downfall of evil, appealed to him as
solid, as related to a process, a drama, that went on in himself, and,
he supposed, in everybody else. It worried and annoyed him when
Morrison made fun of these values and jeered at them.
"But things don't work like that," she protested.
"I think they do," he said.
"Good people are often crushed," she replied, "and bad people often
have things all their own way."
"But it is inside people that it happens like that. False people have
their souls eaten away with lies, and true people have free, happy
souls like yours. Being rich or poor, or what you call good or bad,
has nothing to do with it. Yes. It is inside people that it happens
like that, and I am more often the villain than the hero inside
myself."
"It seems absurd to me, and I can't think why you should take it
seriously."
"It is because you are so idiotically good. You have only one side to
your nature. You are like a heroine in your Dickens."
"I'm not. I'm sure I'm not. I'm bad-tempered and mean and unjust."
"You don't even know how bad I am. You have no more idea of what my
life is like than a rose has of an onion's."
"I don't like onions."
"That's the trouble. You don't like the smell of onions, and so you
don't eat them. Very poor people live on bread and onions and they
find them good. I have no patience with you. You want to be a rose
growing in a sheltered English garden."
"I don't. I don't want anything of the kind."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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