"Why were you so determined not to draw him?" I asked. 🔊

"Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn't exist?" 🔊

"He is dim," I admitted. 🔊 But my mot juste fell flat. 🔊 Rothenstein repeated that Soames was non-existent. 🔊

Still, Soames had written a book. 🔊 I asked if Rothenstein had read "Negations." 🔊 He said he had looked into it, "but," he added crisply, "I don't profess to know anything about writing." 🔊 A reservation very characteristic of the period! 🔊 Painters would not then allow that any one outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting. 🔊 This law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the summit of Fuji-yama) imposed certain limitations. 🔊 If other arts than painting were not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practiced them, the law tottered—the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold good. 🔊 Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without warning you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. 🔊 No one is a better judge of literature than Rothenstein; but it wouldn't have done to tell him so in those days, and I knew that I must form an unaided judgment of "Negations." 🔊

Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face would have been for me in those days an impossible act of self-denial. 🔊 When I returned to Oxford for the Christmas term I had duly secured "Negations." 🔊 I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my room, and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about, I would say: "Oh, it's rather a remarkable book. 🔊 It's by a man whom I know." 🔊 Just "what it was about" I never was able to say. 🔊 Head or tail was just what I hadn't made of that slim, green volume. 🔊 I found in the preface no clue to the labyrinth of contents, and in that labyrinth nothing to explain the preface. 🔊