Reblogged from Tallis Steelyard:

Woman’s Mission: Companion of Manhood 1863 George Elgar Hicks 1824-1914 Presented by David Barclay 1960 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T00397

I suppose the reason this story came to mind was that I overhead somebody in a bar comment that ‘they’d got away with it.’ One thing increasing maturity has taught me is that ‘The Lady’ is not to be slighted. Whether you think of her as ‘fortune’ or ‘luck’ or even ‘fate’, to me she will always be ‘The Lady’ and I will not knowingly cross her. Claiming that ‘you have got away with it’ is merely asking her to take a personal interest in orchestrating your downfall and humiliation. My experience is that she might occasionally smile on our attempts to deceive, but there are some things she will not countenance.

As an aside I don’t want anybody to think I write this out of jealousy. I realise that too many in the artistic community revel in the downfall of their more successful peers. The thought would not cross my mind. I merely tell the tale because I feel I have a duty to present it as an awful warning to younger writers. They are less experienced and are more likely to be lured into the dark sordid underbelly of our art. Nobody deserves to fall as far as Kasas Phloom did.

Kasar obviously thought he was untouchable and taunted fate. Originally he was Kasas Flom, but increasing affluence and respectability brought with them pretensions. These manifested themselves in a number of ways, but mainly as the extra letters in his name. He claimed to be a poet and a writer, but he had no large body of work with which to support this claim. He had family investments, and he married well.

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