ancient flint-locks and cried to me: 'There's the real thing. These new
rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.' They damned the books
I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the
fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them 'clever'.

"And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets,
listening--to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of
Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to
Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and
Marlow, bassos profundo. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron
declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I
learned a little of beauty--enough to know that it had nothing to do
with truth--and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary
tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every
literary tradition....

"Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from
me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life
rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.

"The transition was subtle--the thing had lain in wait for me for some
time. It has its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for every one. With
me? No--I didn't try to seduce the janitor's wife--nor did I run through
the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility. It is never quite
passion that does the business--it is the dress that passion wears. I
became bored--that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a
frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my
acts. Beauty was behind me, do you understand?--I was grown." He paused.
"End of school and college period. Opening of Part Two."