“I think I might like it if I were drunk.”

“Ah, but a poet, you see, is always drunk!”

’Well, I unfortunately, am often sober; and then I find the sponger and the venerealee anything but agreeable objects.”

“Besides,” said Audubon, “though it’s very good of Walt Whitman to invite us all, the mere fact of dining with him, however miscellaneous the company, doesn’t alter the character of the dinner.”

“No,” cried Leslie, “and that’s just the point Ellis has missed all through.  Even if it be true that the world appears to him as a work of art, it doesn’t appear so to the personages of the drama.  What’s play to him is grim earnest to them; and, what’s more, he himself is an actor not a mere spectator, and may have that fact brought home to him, any moment, in his flesh and blood.”

“Of course!” replied Ellis, “and I wouldn’t have it otherwise.  The point of the position is that one should play one’s part oneself, but play it as an artist with one’s eye upon the total effect, never complaining of Evil merely because one happens to suffer, but taking the suffering itself as an element in the aesthetic perfection of the Whole.”

“I should like to see you doing that,” said Bartlett, rather brutally, “when you were down with a fit of yellow fever.”

“Or shut up in a mad-house,” said Leslie.

“Or working eight hours a day at business,” said Audubon, “with the thermometer 100 degrees in the shade.”

“Oh well,” answered Ellis, “those are the confounded accidents of our unhealthy habits of life.”

“I am afraid,” I said, “they are accidents very essential to the substance of the world.”

“Besides,” cried Parry, “there’s the whole moral question, which you seem to ignore altogether.  If there be any activity that is good, it must be, I suppose, the one that is right; and the activity you describe seems to have nothing to do with right and wrong.”

“Right and wrong!  Right and wrong!” echoed Ellis,

  “Das hoer ich sechzlg Jahre wiederholen,
  Ich fluche drauf, aber verstohlen.”

“You may curse as much as you like,” replied Parry, “but you can hardly deny that there is an intimate connection between Good and Right.”

Instead of replying Ellis began to whistle; so I took up Parry’s point and said, “Yes, but what is the connection?  My own idea is that Right is really a means to Good.  And I should separate off all activity that is merely a means from that which is really an end in itself, and good.”

“But is there any activity,” objected Leslie, “which is not merely a means?”

“Oh yes,” I said, “I should have thought so.  Most men, it seems to me, are well enough content with what they are doing for its own sake; even though at the same time they have remoter ends in view, and if these were cut off would cease, perhaps, to take pleasure in the work of the moment.  The attitude is not very logical, perhaps, but I think it is very common.  Why else is it that men who believe and maintain that they only work in order to make money, nevertheless are so unwilling to retire when the money is made; or, if they do, are so often dissatisfied and unhappy?”