set out to discover America. Yes, there is often an accidental quality in great art and oftener still there is an accidental appreciation of it. In one sense art is curiously bound up with its own epoch, but appreciation or depreciation of its relation to that epoch may come in another generation. The judgment of posterity may be cruel to contemporary genius. In a few years we may decide that Richard Strauss is only another Liszt and Stravinsky, another Rubinstein.
Inspiration! Richards shrugged his broad shepherd's plaid shoulders. Inspiration! Artists, critics, public, clever men, and philistines monotonously employ that word, but it seems to me that art is created through memory out of experience, combined with a capacity for feeling and expressing experience, and depending on the artist's physical condition at the time when he is at work.
Are you, I asked, one of those who believes that a novelist must be unfaithful to his wife before he can write a fine novel, that a girl should have an amour with a prize-fighter before she can play Juliet, and that a musician must be a pederast before he can construct a great symphony?
Richards laughed.
No, he replied, I am not, but that theory is very popular. How many times I have heard it thundered forth! Asa matter of fact, there is a certain amount of truth in it, the germ, indeed, of a great truth, for some emotional experience is essential to
