In Search of the Elusive Muse

WHAT drearier rut for an artist than that which led between servile slipperdom in the shires and the billiard rooms, smoke rooms and theatre crush-bars of the city? The shunting back and forth, the search for a quiet place where the departing Muse might once again be persuaded to settle: such very restlessness guaranteed it never would. Perhaps, then, in Brazil. Perhaps what had deserted him in fading England was now waiting among the energetic canopies of vast forests, its jeweled wings folded. It seem ed unlikely; but then everything did.