said as I went back to the subject while we turned up our heels to
the sky. "At least the people who dislike my stuff--and there are
plenty of them, I believe--will dislike this thing (if it does turn
out well) most." This was the first time I had heard him allude to
the people who couldn't read him--a class so generally conceived to
sit heavy on the consciousness of the man of letters. A being
organised for literature as Mark Ambient was must certainly have had
the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic
ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have
been in his composition sufficiently erect and active. I won't
therefore go so far as to say that he never thought of his detractors
or that he had any illusions with regard to the number of his
admirers--he could never so far have deceived himself as to believe
he was popular, but I at least then judged (and had occasion to be
sure later on) that stupidity ruffled him visibly but little, that he
had an air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple
folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he
very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were
always even abnormally vulgar about him. Of course he may have
thought them over--the newspapers--night and day; the only point I
make is that he didn't show it while at the same time he didn't
strike one as a man actively on his guard. I may add that, touching
his hope of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of
his books, it was only partly carried out. That place belongs
incontestably to "Beltraffio," in spite of the beauty of certain
parts of its successor. I quite believe, however, that he had at the
moment of which I speak no sense of having declined; he was in love
with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as I
suppose for every sane artist, the act of execution had in it as much
torment as joy, he saw his result grow like the crescent of the young