This gripped his heart and he wrote out of
himself. But in the other work of his it was otherwise. He has put his
method on record: he listened through a chink in the floor, and wrote
around other people. It is characteristic of the art of our time. Let it
be called art if the critics will, but it is not life.
IV
No, it is not life. But there is so much talk just now of getting "down
to fundamentals," of the poetry of the tramp "walking the world," and
the rest of it, that it would be well if we _did get_ down to
fundamentals; and this is one thing fundamental--the tramp is a deserter
from life. He evades the troubled field where great causes are fought;
he shuns the battle because of the wounds and the sacrifice; he has no
heart for high conflict and victory. Let him under the cover of darkness
but secure his share of the spoils and the world may go to wreck. Yes,
he is the meanest of things--a deserter. On the field of battle he would
be shot. If we let him desert the field of life, go his way and walk the
world, let us not at least hail him as a hero.
The Repertory Theatre is the nursery of this particular art-cult, and
'twould relieve some of us to talk freely about it. The Repertory
Theatre has already become fashionable, and is quite rapidly become a
nuisance. Men are making songs and plays and lectures for art's sake,
for the praise of a coterie or to shock the bourgeois--above all shock
the bourgeois.
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