strained eyes that played over questions as if they were objects and
objects as if they were questions, might have stood, to the life, for
Don Quixote, if we could associate with that hero a far-spreading beard
already a little grizzled, a manner and range of gesture and broken form
of discourse that was like a restless reference to a palette and that
seemed to take for granted, all about, canvases and models and charming,
amusing things, the "tremendously interesting" in the seen bit or caught
moment, and the general unsayability, in comparison, of anything else.
He never would have perched, it must be added, on Rosinante--he was
fonder of horses even than of the method of Couture, and though with a
shade of resemblance, as all simple and imaginative men have, to the
knight of La Mancha, he least suggested that analogy as he passed in a
spinning buggy, his beard flying, behind a favourite trotter. But what
he perhaps most puts before me to-day is the grim truth of the merciless
manner in which a living and hurrying public educates itself, making and
devouring in a day reputations and values which represent something of
the belief in it that it has had in _them_, but at the memory of which
we wince, almost to horror, as at the legend of victims who have been
buried alive. Oh the cold grey luminaries hung about in odd corners and
back passages, and that we have known shining and warm! They serve at
the most now as beacons warning any step not to come _that_ way,
whatever it does; the various attested ways it may not with felicity
come growing thus all the while in number.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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