The “vision,” so far as one could see, had everything to do with pain; in fact it was pain, and the vision might or might not come afterwards. (And I detest that word “mystic.”) The book was exciting and interesting because of a strange mixture of high romance, desperate villainy and an abysmal bitterness. The war came in, naturally. Gerald’s hero had minority ideas about the war--letting the landed gentry down again! As for the pain ... Young Burton’s idea of it had not to do with pain as a fact, but as the most sublime among drugs. You know? “In fact,” Gerald wrote, “it is the only drug that cannot debase a man. It can kill him, but there are worse ways of dying than being killed.” It was full of quotations like that, but Gerald threw them at you with a dash sadly lacking in the originals. Young Burton was, of course, going to die in the war. Young Burton, it appeared, had studied the major and minor tortures of crime and martyrdom. There was a long description of tortures, if you liked that kind of thing. I have seen Gerald’s books on them, with illustrations ... very interesting. Then young Burton had come across the old, old idea that after a certain limit of pain there is a definite state of bliss and definite and glorious visions of a real reality which men by ordinary are too sodden or too timorous to see. But poor old Gerald, try as he would, couldn’t make _The Savage Device_ a novel of ideas: it remained a novel of adventure, with an inhuman interest. Young Burton went everywhere in the world, having adventures, getting magnificently hurt--South Sea stuff--studying the effect of pain on men’s minds. A Chinese bandit helped him to quite a number of visions.