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praising-power he’s been born with exacts perfection. So on all through his gifts: one by one his powers are turned away from the usual object of a man’s personal poetry or passion and so removed from the immediate world. One solitary thing is left facing any woman with whom he has commerce, that is his sex, a lonely phallus.’
    ‘Your creative man sounds rather alarming. I don’t believe in him.’
    ‘Some artists are less complete than others: more or less remains to the man.’
    ‘I’m glad some have more than the bare phallus of them.’
    ‘But the character of the artist’s creation comes in. What tendency has my work as an artist, for I am one of your beastly
creative
persons you will readily allow. You may have noticed that an invariable severity distinguishes it. Apart from its being good or bad, its character is ascetic rather than sensuous, and it is divorced from immediate life. There is no slop of sex in
that
. But there is no severity left over for the work of the cruder senses either. Very often with an artist whose work is very sensuous or human, his sex instinct, if it is active, will be more discriminating than with a man more fastidious and discriminating than he in his work. To sum up this part of my disclosure: no one could have a coarser, more foolish, slovenly taste than I have in women. It is not even sluttish and abject, of the Turner type (the landscape-artist) with his washerwomanat Gravesend. * It is bourgeois, and it is pretty, a cross between the Musical Comedy stage and the dream of the Eighteenth-Century gallant.’ *
    At Eighteenth-Century Hobson moved resentfully.
    ‘What’s the Eighteenth-Century got to do with it?’
    ‘All the delicate psychology another man naturally seeks in a woman, the curiosity of form, windows on other lives, love and passion, I seek in my work and not elsewhere.—Form would perhaps be thickened by child-bearing; it would perhaps be damaged by harlotry. Why should sex still be active? That is an organic matter that has nothing to do with the general energies of the mind.’
    Hobson yawned with sullen relish.
    ‘I see I am boring you—the matter is too remote. But you have trespassed here, and you must listen. I cannot let you off before you have heard, and shown that you understand. If you do not sit and listen, I will write it all to you in a letter. Y OU WILL BE MADE TO HEAR IT !—And
after
I have told you this, I will tell you why I am talking to an idiot like you!’
    ‘You ask me to be polite—.’
    ‘I don’t mind how impolite you are provided you listen.’
    ‘Well I am listening—I have even betrayed interest.’
    Tarr as he saw it was tearing at the blankets swaddling this spirit in its inner snobberies. At all events here was a bitter feast piping hot and going begging, it seemed, and a mouth must be found for it: this jaded palate had to serve under the circumstances and it had, its malicious appetite satisfied, to be taught to do justice to the fare.—He had something to
say
; it must be said while it was living: once it was said, it could look after itself.—As to Hobson, he had shocked something that was ready to burst out: he must help it out: Hobson must pay as well for the intimacy.
He must pay Bertha Lunken afterwards
. Tarr at this point felt like insisting that he should come round and apologize to her.
    ‘A man only goes and importunes the world with a confession when his self will not listen to him or recognize his shortcomings. The function of a friend is to be a substitute for this defective self, to be the World and the Real without the disastrous consequences of reality.—Yet punishment is one of his chief offices. The friend enlarges also substantially the boundaries of our solitude.’
    *

    This statement was to be found in Tarr’s diary. The self he had rebuked in this way for not listening was now again suffering rebuke by his act of confession with the first-met, a man he did not regard as a friend even. Had