dering manifestos against a theatre in which his mother and Eleanora Duse are such conspicuous examples; here is Papini working and dreaming; here is Marinetti shooting off fire-crackers; here are the Braggiottis, teaching young Americans the elements of music in that modern music-room with bas-relief portraits of the great composers, Beethoven, Bach, Verdi, Mozart, Wagner, Rossini . . . and Sebastian B. Schlesinger, moulded in the frieze. Here is Loeser, always building new houses and never completing them; here is Arthur Acton, with a chauffeur who sings tenor arias in the drawing-room after dinner; here is Leo Stein, collecting Renoirs and Cézannes for his villa at Settignano. What does it all mean, unless it means that everything should be scrambled together? I think a great book might be written if everything the hero thought and felt and observed could be put into it. You know how, in the old novel, only what is obviously essential to the plot or the development of character is selected. But a man, crossing a street to commit a murder, does not continuously think of the murder. The cry of Buns! hot cross buns! the smell of onions or dead fish, the sight of a pretty woman, impress his senses and remind him of still other things. These ideas, impressions, objects, should all be set down. Nothing should be omitted, nothing! One might write a whole book of two hundred thousand words about the events of an hour. And what a book! What a book!
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