I was of those doomed to imperfect achievement, and under
a curse, as it were, like some race of birds compelled to spend
the time, needed for the making of the nest, in argument as to the
convenience of moss and twig and lichen. Le Gallienne and
Davidson, and even Symons, were provincial at their setting out,
but their provincialism was curable, mine incurable; while the one
conviction shared by all the younger men, but principally by
Johnson and Horne, who imposed their personalities upon us, was an
opposition to all ideas, all generalisations that can be explained
and debated. E... fresh from Paris would sometimes say--'We are
concerned with nothing but impressions,' but that itself was a
generalisation and met but stony silence. Conversation constantly
dwindled into 'Do you like so and so's last book?' 'No, I prefer
the book before it,' and I think that but for its Irish members,
who said whatever came into their heads, the club would not have
survived its first difficult months. I knew--now ashamed that I
thought 'like a man of letters,' now exasperated at their
indifference to the fashion of their own river bed--that Swinburne
in one way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had
filled their work with what I called 'impurities,' curiosities
about politics, about science, about history, about religion; and
that we must create once more the pure work.
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