 of
association can ever, for excitement, I judge, have bettered it at its best. For
the dramatist always, by the very law of his genius, believes not only in a
possible right issue from the rightly-conceived tight place; he does much more
than this - he believes, irresistibly, in the necessary, the precious tightness
of the place (whatever the issue) on the strength of any respectable hint. It
being thus the respectable hint that I had with such avidity picked up, what
would be the story to which it would most inevitably form the centre? It is part
of the charm attendant on such questions that the story, with the omens true, as
I say, puts on from this stage the authenticity of concrete existence. It then
is, essentially - it begins to be, though it may more or less obscurely lurk; so
that the point is not in the least what to make of it, but only, very
delightfully and very damnably, where to put one's hand on it.
    In which truth resides surely much of the interest of that admirable mixture
for salutary application which we know as art. Art deals with what we see, it
must first contribute full-handed that ingredient; it plucks its material,
otherwise expressed, in the garden of life - which material elsewhere grown is
stale and uneatable. But it has no sooner done this than it has to take account
of a process - from which only when it's the basest of the servants of man,
incurring ignominious dismissal with no character, does it, and whether under
some muddled pretext of morality or on any other, pusillanimously edge away. The
process, that of the expression, the literal squeezing-out, of value is another
affair - with which the happy luck of mere finding has little to do. The joys of
finding, at this stage, are pretty well over; that quest of the subject as a
whole by matching, as the ladies say at the shops, the big piece with the
snippet, having ended, we assume, with a capture. The subject is found, and if
the problem is then transferred to the ground of what to do with it the field
opens out for any amount of doing. This is precisely the infusion that, as I
submit, completes the strong mixture. It is on the other hand the part of the
business that can least be likened to the chase with horn and hound. It's all a
sedentary part - involves as much ciphering, of sorts, as would merit the
highest salary paid to a
