, the tale was taken up afresh by the charming light click
and clatter, that sound as of the thin, quick, quite feminine surface-breathing
of Paris, the shortest of rhythms for so huge an organism.
    I shall not tell whether I did there bring my book to a close - and indeed I
shrink, for myself, from putting the question to the test of memory. I follow it
so far, the old urgent ingenious business, and then I lose sight of it: from
which I infer - all exact recovery of the matter failing - that I did not in the
event drag over the Channel a lengthening chain; which would have been
detestable. I reduce to the absurd perhaps, however by that small subjective
issue, any undue measure of the interest of this insistent recovery of what I
have called attendant facts. There always has been, for the valid work of art, a
history - though mainly inviting, doubtless, but to the curious critic, for whom
such things grow up and are formed very much in the manner of attaching young
lives and characters, those conspicuous cases of happy development as to which
evidence and anecdote are always in order. The development indeed must be
certain to have been happy, the life sincere, the character fine: the work of
art, to create or repay critical curiosity, must in short have been very valid
indeed. Yet there is on the other hand no mathematical measure of that
importance - it may be a matter of widely-varying appreciation; and I am willing
to grant, assuredly, that this interest, in a given relation, will nowhere so
effectually kindle as on the artist's own part. And I am afraid that after all
even his best excuse for it must remain the highly personal plea - the joy of
living over, as a chapter of experience, the particular intellectual adventure.
Here lurks an immense homage to the general privilege of the artist, to that
constructive, that creative passion - portentous words, but they are convenient
- the exercise of which finds so many an occasion for appearing to him the
highest of human fortunes, the rarest boon of the gods. He values it, all
sublimely and perhaps a little fatuously, for itself - as the great extension,
great beyond all others, of experience and of consciousness; with the toil and
trouble a mere sun-cast shadow that falls, shifts and vanishes, the result of
his living in so large a light. On the constant nameless felicity of this Robert
Louis Stevenson has, in an admirable passage and as in so many other connexions,
said
