25 by Beverley Nichols — Read

All young men love paying pilgrimages, especially when the pilgrimage is to some rather exotic and remote hermit who happens to be in the vogue. Incidentally, I am quite convinced that the hermits like it too. How often has one read, in memoirs, of the humble, too humble, delight of some wild musician who is visited, in his retreat in the Northern Hebrides, by young things from Oxford, who group themselves in decorative attitudes round his carpet slippers. ‘To me, living in the realm of art,' he writes, ‘these visits from fellow-spirits in the outer world are infinitely sweet, infinitely welcome. Mr. Bernard Bank, of Brasenose, arrived to-day at dawn, praying that I might come down, so that he should throw himself at my feet. I did. And he did. I feel "remarkably refreshed."

I rather wish that I had gone to see Norman Lindsay in this way. He has all the qualifications for a really good hermit scene. He lives in the heart of the Blue Mountains beyond Sydney, he is an utterly isolated figure in an immense continent, and his finely erotic designs have given a great many dull people fits.