Why then, though, granting these delusions,--the sane may reasonably inquire,--should any madman seek to provoke this punishment, and even court it with painstakings and with year-long self-denials? The reply to that question is simple: I do not know. I doubt if anybody does. Nor, I imagine, had either of these paunched and spectacled and thin-haired fanatics, blinking among his finished books, the leisure for such, upon the whole, irrelevant problems.... It would merely seem, I daresay, to his romanticizing time-bleared eyes, that single-mindedness, if but occasionally, if but for a brief while as go the necessaries of high-wrought prose, may evade Them. It would seem to him that, in this grudged, snatched while, he, somehow,--in part through less of crass ill luck than daily tumbles mere genius graveward, and in part, too, through wasting no least moment upon irrelevant matters,--had contrived to get some of his books completed in more or less the shape he had wanted, with that irrational, inborn, resistless hunger which made the other matters irrelevant.... And then you would be almost as grateful for as you were worried by the unaccountable way in which you would seem still to be slipping by Them, somehow, and thus far. And so at times you would bluster to keep up your courage. And at other times you would cross your fingers.... For, really, in the last forties, with those depressing items in the paper every morning, you might with an equal sense of assurance be typing, always typing, on a battlefield to a distracting accompaniment of burst shells. And each new book completed by you would thus take on an element of the miraculous not wholly based upon the volume's contents: and you would, in point of fact, quite probably unwrap the first actual copies saying, with rather more of wonder than of gloating, "Well, I got that one done, anyway!" For about the third of Them there is no doubt nor any possible disputing. And it is against common-sense and piety and death that the artist conducts his utterly futile rebellion.... Yes, I believe, I understood those aging romantics, who approached, the colophon of so many books. § 58 --Because, I submit, it is wholly conceivable that men may, by and by, get rid of common-sense and piety; but this human habit of dying appears ineradicable. There is always ahead, and always a little nearer, the one and one only exit from the familiar corridor of our workaday existence. All of us thus pass, futilely, nesciently, helplessly, through tedium to horror: for we live _in articulo mortis_; our doings here, when unaffectedly regarded, are but the restlessness of a prolonged demise; and the birth-cry of every infant announces the beginning of the death-agony....