Charteris replied with something of the hasty affability appropriate to dealings with the insane. "Now, my dear man! the whole point was that the artist strives to make something which endures--" "I know! You explained what he attempts to do: but you did not explain why he should want to do it. You did not explain what he gets out of it,--beyond suggesting, and then retracting the suggestion, that he aspires to a sort of terrestrial immortality. No, Charteris, you explained, in fine, nearly everything connected with books except why an author writes them." He deliberated this. He said: "Oh, but I must have made that plain. I can most vividly remember elucidating every bit of the universe, and that rather important detail could not well have been ignored." "Ignored or not, you left it unexplained." And promptly Charteris settled back in his chair, intent to remedy this omission. "The author, then, very much as I did, will under provocation become magniloquent, and will say this, that and the other. But every author's real reason for writing is that, if he did not write, he would be bored to death. He writes because--" Here I stopped him. "No, Charteris! You are too fond of juggling phrases with no better end in view than to get pleasure from your own dexterity. And I happen to be in earnest. Some twenty years and more, you conceive, I have given over, together with health and eyesight, to the writing of the Biography: and I am nowadays, however late in the game, quite honestly and not unnaturally concerned to find out why." "So, then! at last, you sympathize with your reviewers!" "It was well enough, in the beginning," I went on, "to listen to your Economist theories: and while you talked I could believe in them, almost. Your verbal jugglery, I do not question, would still have that effect. But the moment you have done talking, I can but come back to the blunt truth, unwillingly: the artist cannot ever by making a statue or a painting or a book--no matter how long the thing made may last,--immortalize himself. He would come a great deal nearer to perpetuating himself by begetting as many children as his natural forces and the frailty of his friends permitted--" "Ah, the lewd Jurgen touch!" said Charteris, regretfully. "--And it can in no way concern the artist, either for good or ill," I continued, "that something which he happened to make, endures after he has perished. No doubt, you could explain the contradiction in your argument: you slightly married men have learned how to explain everything. But, after all, this is an affair in which I want my own notions, not yours." § 3