"This pleasing method of instilling instruction into the mind has been found by experience to be the shortest and best way of accomplishing that end among all ranks of persons. The fable of The Poor Man and His Lamb, for example, as related by Nathan to King David, carried with it a blaze of truth that flashed conviction on the mind of the royal transgressor: and many lessons of reproof, religion, and morality, we find to be continually delivered in this mode by the sages." _4._ _The Thin Queen of Elfhame_ § 37 The literary artist plays, I had said, with these large ageless symbols. And all artists would, I thought, continue indefinitely in such playing, because their fundamental desire in life is not quite the same desire which guides their fellows. The artist is as other men: he may well, in common with Shylock, assert himself to be fed by the same food and subject to the same diseases as a Christian is: and yet between him and the Christian is a difference. Certainly, there was a difference: and the nearest I could come to defining this difference was to say it lay paradoxically housed in the circumstance that the artist, precisely like the most zealous of Christians, is in this material, four-square world not ever utterly at home. The Christian's desiderated home, we knew, was heaven: but the artist, as I had suggested, looked to a somewhat different savior. Meanwhile the artist went among men as a visitor, evincing at once the astonished interest and the detachment of a tourist in a foreign country. His home, and his fundamental desire, stayed elsewhere. This world of men and women did not content nor even vitally concern him: and always he wanted--no matter with what nebulousness he envisaged his need,--something else, which, somehow, was his heritage. Some day, the artist felt, he would set forth to seek and find this needed something, like Anavalt in the old tale which I had once retold. And I fell here to recalling the story of Anavalt's last quest. For I had been assured time and again that this tale was a parable of a withdrawal from life to the solaces of art, and that there was some obvious symbolism, toward the end, in a seemingly off-hand reference to the tenuity of canvas and of paper. And I could only reply with the admission which youth finds it impossible to make about anything, but which with age comes easier. I said, I do not know. Nescience seemed alike the end and the beginning of the old story, which narrated why so many silken ladies wept.... § 38