It was at this figure that Morton Ellis continued to gaze with affability and irritation.  It was this figure that Vera’s eyes followed with anxious, restless passion, as if she felt that at any moment he might escape her, might be off, God knew where.

Lawrence Stephen was ill at ease in that house and in the presence of his mistress and his friends.

“I believe in the past,” he said, “because I believe in the future.  I want continuity.  Therefore I believe in Swinburne; and I believe in Browning and in Tennyson and Wordsworth; I believe in Keats and Shelley and in Milton.  But I do not believe, any more than you do, in their imitators.  I believe in destroying their imitators.  I do not believe in destroying them.”

“You can’t destroy their imitators unless you destroy them.  They breed the disgusting parasites.  Their memories harbour them like a stinking suit of old clothes.  They must be scrapped and burned if we’re to get rid of the stink.  Art has got to be made young and new and clean.  There isn’t any disinfectant that’ll do the trick.  So long as old masters are kow-towed to as masters people will go on imitating them.  When a poet ceases to be a poet and becomes a centre of corruption, he must go.”

Michael said, “How about us when people imitate us?  Have we got to go?”

Morton Ellis looked at him and blinked.  “No,” he said.  “No.  We haven’t got to go.”

“I don’t see how you get out of it.”

“I get out of it by doing things that can’t be imitated.”

There was a silence in which everybody thought of Mr. George Wadham.  It made Mr. Wadham so uncomfortable that he had to break it.

“I say, how about Shakespeare?” he said.

“Nobody, so far, has imitated Shakespeare, any more than they have succeeded in imitating me.”

There was another silence while everybody thought of Morton Ellis as the imitator of every poetic form under the sun except the forms adopted by his contemporaries.

“That’s all very well, Ellis,” said Stephen, “but you aren’t the Holy Ghost coming down out of heaven.  We can trace your sources.”

“My dear Stephen, I never said I was the Holy Ghost.  Nobody ever does come down out of heaven.  You can trace my sources, thank God, because they’re clean.  I haven’t gone into every stream that swine like—­and—­and—­and—­and—­” (he named five contemporary distinctions) “have made filthy with their paddling.”

He went on.  “The very damnable question that you’ve raised, Harrison, is absurd.  You believe in the revolution.  Well then, supposing the revolution’s coming—­you needn’t suppose it, because it’s come.  We are the revolution—­the revolution means that we’ve made a clean sweep of the past.  In the future no artist will want to imitate anybody.  No artist will be allowed to exist unless he’s prepared to be buried alive or burned alive rather than corrupt the younger generation with the processes and the products of his own beastly dissolution.