The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald [13]
Richard Caramel was offended. His scowl crinkled like crushed paper.
"No—" he began, but Anthony interrupted ruthlessly.
"Oh, yes; kind who just at present sit in corners and confer on the latest Scandinavian Dante available in English translation."
Dick turned to him, a curious falling in his whole countenance. His question was almost an appeal.
"What's the matter with you and Maury? You talk sometimes as though I were a sort of inferior."
Anthony was confused, but he was also cold and a little uncomfortable, so he took refuge in attack.
"I don't think your brains matter, Dick."
"Of course they matter!" exclaimed Dick angrily. "What do you mean? Why don't they matter?"
"You might know too much for your pen."
"I couldn't possibly."
"I can imagine," insisted Anthony, "a man knowing too much for his talent to express. Like me. Suppose, for instance, I have more wisdom than you, and less talent. It would tend to make me inarticulate. You, on the contrary, have enough water to fill the pail and a big enough pail to hold the water."
"I don't follow you at all," complained Dick in a crestfallen tone. Infinitely dismayed, he seemed to bulge in protest. He was staring intently at Anthony and caroming off a succession of passers-by, who reproached him with fierce, resentful glances.
"I simply mean that a talent like Wells's could carry the intelligence of a Spencer. But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it's carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it."
Dick considered, unable to decide the exact degree of criticism intended by Anthony's remarks. But Anthony, with that facility which seemed so frequently to flow from him, continued, his dark eyes gleaming in his thin face, his chin raised, his voice raised, his whole physical being raised:
"Say I am proud and sane and wise—an Athenian among Greeks. Well, I might fail where a lesser man would succeed. He could imitate, he could adorn, he could be enthusiastic, he could be hopefully constructive. But this hypothetical me would be too proud to imitate, too sane to be enthusiastic, too sophisticated to be Utopian, too Grecian to adorn."
"Then you don't think the artist works from his intelligence?"
"No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because it's his mode of living. Don't tell me you like this 'Divine Function of the Artist' business?"
"I'm not accustomed even to refer to myself as an artist."
"Dick," said Anthony, changing his tone, "I want to beg your pardon."
"Why?"
"For that outburst. I'm honestly sorry. I was talking for effect."
Somewhat mollified, Dick rejoined:
"I've often said you were a Philistine at heart."
It was a crackling dusk when they turned in under the white façade of the Plaza and tasted slowly the foam and yellow thickness of an egg-nog. Anthony looked at his companion. Richard Caramel's nose and brow were slowly approaching a like pigmentation; the red was leaving the one, the blue deserting the other. Glancing in a mirror, Anthony was glad to find that his own skin had not discolored. On the contrary, a faint glow had kindled in his cheeks—he fancied that he had never looked so well.
"Enough for me," said Dick, his tone that of an athlete in training. "I want to go up and see the Gilberts. Won't you come?"
"Why—yes. If you don't dedicate me to the parents and dash off in the corner with Dora."
"Not Dora—Gloria."
A clerk announced them over the phone, and ascending to the tenth floor they followed a winding corridor and knocked at 1088. The door was answered by a middle-aged lady—Mrs. Gilbert herself.
"How do you do?" She spoke in the conventional American lady-lady language. "Well, I'm awfully glad to see you—"
Hasty interjections by Dick, and then: