Murder in Any Degree | Page 2

They must.
They can't help it. It's the one thing you can't resist. You begin it when
you're poor to save the expense of a servant, and you keep it up when
you succeed to have some one over you to make you work. You belong
psychologically to the intellectually dependent classes, the
clinging-vine family, the masculine parasites; and as you can't help
being married, you are always damning it, holding it responsible for all
your failures."
At this characteristic speech, the five artists shifted slightly, and looked
at De Gollyer over their mustaches with a lingering appetite, much as a
group of terriers respect the family cat.
"My dear chaps, speaking as a critic," continued De Gollyer, pleasantly
aware of the antagonism he had exploded, "you remain children afraid
of the dark--afraid of being alone. Solitude frightens you. You lack the
quality of self-sufficiency that is the characteristic of the higher critical
faculties. You marry because you need a nurse."
He ceased, thoroughly satisfied with the prospect of having brought on
a quarrel, raised thumb and first finger in a gingerly loop, ordered a
dash of sherry and winked across the group to Tommers, who was
listening around his paper from the reading-room.

"De Gollyer, you are only a 'who's who' of art," said Quinny, with,
however, a hungry gratitude for a topic of such possibilities. "You
understand nothing of psychology. An artist is a multiple personality;
with each picture he paints he seeks a new inspiration. What is
inspiration?"
"Ah, that's the point--inspiration," said Steingall, waking up.
"Inspiration," said Quinny, eliminating Steingall from his preserves
with the gesture of brushing away a fly--"inspiration is only a form of
hypnosis, under the spell of which a man is capable of rising outside of
and beyond himself, as a horse, under extraordinary stress, exerts a
muscular force far beyond his accredited strength. The race of geniuses,
little and big, are constantly seeking this outward force to hypnotize
them into a supreme intellectual effort. Talent does not understand such
a process; it is mechanical, unvarying, chop-chop, day in and day out.
Now, what you call inspiration may be communicated in many
ways--by the spectacle of a mob, by a panorama of nature, by sudden
and violent contrasts of points of view; but, above all, as a continual
stimulus, it comes from that state of mental madness which is produced
by love."
"Huh?" said Stibo.
"Anything that produces a mental obsession, une idée fixe, is a form of
madness," said Quinny, rapidly. "A person in love sees only one face,
hears only one voice; at the base of the brain only one thought is
constantly drumming. Physically such a condition is a narcotic;
mentally it is a form of madness that in the beneficent state is
powerfully hypnotic."
At this deft disentanglement of a complicated idea, Rankin, who, like
the professional juryman, wagged his head in agreement with each
speaker and was convinced by the most violent, gazed upon Quinny
with absolute adoration.
"We were speaking of woman," said Towsey, gruffly, who pronounced
the sex with a peculiar staccato sound.

"This little ABC introduction," said Quinny, pleasantly, "is necessary to
understand the relation a woman plays to the artist. It is not the woman
he seeks, but the hypnotic influence which the woman can exert on his
faculties if she is able to inspire him with a passion."
"Precisely why he marries," said De Gollyer.
"Precisely," said Quinny, who, having seized the argument by chance,
was pleasantly surprised to find that he was going to convince himself.
"But here is the great distinction: to be an inspiration, a woman should
always represent to the artist a form of the unattainable. It is the search
for something beyond him that makes him challenge the stars, and all
that sort of rot, you know."
"The tragedy of life," said Rankin, sententiously, "is that one woman
cannot mean all things to one man all the time."
It was a phrase which he had heard the night before, and which he flung
off casually with an air of spontaneity, twisting the old Spanish ring on
his bony, white fingers, which he held invariably in front of his long,
sliding nose.
"Thank you, I said that about the year 1907," said Quinny, while
Steingall gasped and nudged Towsey. "That is the tragedy of life, not
the tragedy of art, two very different things. An artist has need of ten,
fifteen, twenty women, according to the multiplicity of his ideas. He
should be always violently in love or violently reacting."
"And the wife?" said De Gollyer. "Has she any influence?"
"My dear fellow, the greatest. Without a wife, an artist falls a prey to
the inspiration of the moment--condemned to it; and as he is not an
analyst, he ends