Explore "A Bubble Reputation" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
One crowded hour of glorious life / Is worth an age without a name.
I had never suspected Sweeting of a desire to be "somebody. " Indeed, the _jeunesse dorée_, in whose ranks Nature had seemed unquestioningly to bestow him, is not subject to diffidence, or prone to the wisdom which justifies itself in a knowledge of its own limitations. I was familiar with his placid, cherubic face at a minor club or two, in the Park, in Strand restaurants and Gaiety stalls; and it had never once occurred to me to classify him as apart from his fellows of the exquisite guild. If, like Keats, he could appreciate the hell of conscious failure, its most poignant anguish, I could have sworn, would borrow from some too-late realization of the correctest "form" in a hat-brim or shirt-collar. I could have sworn it, I say, and I should have been, of course, mistaken. Keats may have claimed it as his poetical prerogative to go ill-dressed, and to object, though John, to be dubbed "Johnny. " It remained to Sweeting to prove that a man might be a very typical "Johnny" and a poet to boot. But I will explain.