beside any other book in your library and tell me how it strikes you. Look at anything that Charles Shannon condescends to exhibit in the Academy and see how the quality of it slays everything around it exactly as a picture by Whistler or Rossetti would do.
To revert to immensity of output (I have to keep levanting and tacking about), I call immense the output of Belloc (the modern Sterne), Chesterton (the modern Swift), E. V. Lucas (the modern Addison); they themselves would be flattered at the comparisons. These chaps, though they can and sometimes do write as well as the men of the nineties, spoil their average by writing immensely; and they write immensely because they want a good deal of money. Now the men of the nineties hadn't clubs, homes, wives or children; lunched for a shilling; dined for eighteen pence; and didn't want a lot of money. They cared neither for money nor fame; they cared for their own esteem and that of what you call their coterie and I their set.
And that (to answer a question which you once asked me) is art for art's sake; and I maintain that it is not right to call this meaningless or pretentious or a sham.
This coterie, or set, was not noisy: I never met a quieter; it was self-sufficient only in the
