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X. THE IMAGININGS OF MR. HOOPDRIVER'S HEART
Mr. Hoopdriver was (in the days of this story) a poet, though he had
never written a line of verse. Or perhaps romancer will describe him
better. Like I know not how many of those who do the fetching and
carrying of life,--a great number of them certainly,--his real life was
absolutely uninteresting, and if he had faced it as realistically as
such people do in Mr. Gissing's novels, he would probably have come by
way of drink to suicide in the course of a year. But that was just what
he had the natural wisdom not to do. On the contrary, he was always
decorating his existence with imaginative tags, hopes, and poses,
deliberate and yet quite effectual self-deceptions; his experiences were
mere material for a romantic superstructure. If some power had given
Hoopdriver the 'giftie' Burns invoked, 'to see oursels as ithers see
us,' he would probably have given it away to some one else at the very
earliest opportunity. His entire life, you must understand, was not a
continuous romance, but a series of short stories linked only by the
general resemblance of their hero, a brown-haired young fellow commonly,
with blue eyes and a fair moustache, graceful rather than strong, sharp
and resolute rather than clever (cp., as the scientific books say,
p. 2). Invariably this person possessed an iron will. The stories
fluctuated indefinitely. The smoking of a cigarette converted
Hoopdriver's hero into something entirely worldly, subtly rakish, with a
humorous twinkle in the eye and some gallant sinning in the background.
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