“You’re too ridiculous,” laughed Teresa, “and theories about literature, you know, are rather dangerous, and allow me to point out that all the things that ... well, that one perhaps regrets in poor Wordsworth, whom you despise so much, that all these things are the result of his main theory, namely, that everything is equally interesting and equally poetic. While the other things—the incomparable things—happened _in spite_ of his theories.”
“Oh, yes ... trudging over the moors through the rain, and he’s sniffing because he’s lost his handkerchief, and he’s thinking of tea—sent him by that chap in India or China, what was his name? You know ... the friend of Lamb’s—and of hot tea cakes.”
Teresa gave her cool, superior smile. “Poor Guy! You’ve got a complex about Wordsworth.”
After a little pause, she went on, “Literature, I think, ought to _transpose_ life ... turn it into a new thing. It has to come pushing up through all the endless labyrinths of one’s mind—like catechumens in the ancient Mysteries wandering through cave after cave of strange visions, and coming out at the other end new men. I mean ... oh, it’s so difficult to say what I mean ... but one looks at—say, that view, and the result is that one writes—well, the love story of King Alfred, or ... a sonnet on a sun-dial. I remember I once read a description by a psychologist of the process that went on in the mind of a certain Italian dramatist: he would be teased for months by some abstract philosophical idea and gradually it would turn itself into, and be completely lost in an _action_—living men and women doing things. It seems to me an extraordinarily beautiful process—really creative.... Transubstantiation, that’s what it is really; but the bad writers are like priests who haven’t proper Orders—they can scream _hoc est corpus_ till they are hoarse, but nothing happens.”
Guy had wriggled impatiently during this monologue; and now he said, in a very small voice, “You ... you _do_ like my poetry, don’t you, Teresa?”
She looked at him; of course, he deserved to be slapped for his egotism and vanity, but his eager, babyish face was so ridiculous—like Jasper’s—and when Jasper climbed on to the chest of drawers and shouted, “Look at me, Teresa! _Teresa!_ Look at me!” as if he had achieved the ascent of Mount Everest, she always feigned surprise and admiration.