OBSTACLES ON THE PATH 
447 
Dumas, Lytton, Huysmans, Mabel Collins, and Arthur Machen. 
You look at me with strange sad eyes: "But you, too, 
Master, have not you too led a life as strange, as glamourous, 
as weird and as romantic, as the best of them? Then why this 
cold detachment from that ambience?" Well, if you put it 
like that, I can only say that I feel at the same time more 
guilty and entirely innocent! 
For, while the charge is true, the defence is not to be 
shaken. 
The worst of all teachers are the Boloney Magnates, of 
whom I have already given some account. But the next worst 
are just exactly those who try to create an atmosphere of 
romance, and succeed only in a crude theatricalism. So, 
avoiding the swirling turmoil of Scylla, I have broken the ship 
on the barren rock Charybdis. 
Now let me hearten you, brave sister! All the old tales are 
true! You can have as many dragons, princesses, vampires, 
knights-errant, glendowers, enchanted apes, Jinn, sorcerers 
and incubi as you like to fancy, and-whoa Emma! did 1 tell 
you about Cardinal Newman? Well, I will. 
The one passage in his snivelling Apologia which impressed 
me was a tale of his childhood-before 
the real poet, lover, 
and mystic had been buried beneath the dung-heap of 
Theology. He tells us that he read The Arabian Nights-in a 
heavily Bowdlerized edition, bet you a tosser! -and was 
enchanted, like the rest of us, so that he sighed "I wish these 
tales were true!" The same thing happened to me; but I set 
my teeth, and muttered: "I will make these tales true!" 
Well, I have, haven't I? You said it yourself! 
Yes child, my deepest attitude is to be found in my life. I 
have been to most of the holy inaccessible places, and talked 
with the most holy inaccessible men; I have dared all the 
most dangerous adventures, both of the flesh and of the 
spirit; and 1 challenge the world's literature to match for 
sublimity and terror such experiences as those in the latter 
half of The Vision and the Voice.