Scene: The Smoking-room of the Elivas Club.

Characters: Laudator Temporeys, Ætat. 54, a distinguished literary critic, and Luke Cullus, a rich connoisseur of art and life. They are not smoking nor drinking spirits. One is sipping barley water, the other Vichy.

Luke Cullus. You are a dreadful pessimist!

Laudator Temporeys. Alas! there is no such thing in these days. We are merely disappointed optimists. When Walter Pater died I did not realise that English literature expired. Yet the event excited hardly any interest in the Press. Our leading weekly, the Spectator, merely mentioned that Brasenose College, Oxford, had lost an excellent Dean.

L. C. I can hardly understand you. Painting, I admit, is entirely a lost art, so far as England is concerned. The death of Burne-Jones brought our tradition to an end. I see no future for any of the arts except needlework, of which, I am told, there is a hopeful revival. But in your fields of literature, what a number of great names! How I envy you!

L. T. Who is there?

L. C. Well, to take the novelists first: you have the great Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Maurice Hewlett . . . I can’t remember the names of any others just at present. Then take the poets: Austin Dobson, my own special favourite; and among the younger men, A. E. Housman, Laurence Housman, Yeats, Arthur Symons, Laurence Binyon, William Watson—

L. T. (interrupting). Who always keeps one foot in Wordsworth’s grave. But all the men you mention, my dear Cullus, belong to the last century. They have done their best work. Hardy has become mummy, and Henry James is sold in Balham. Except Hardy, they have become unintelligible. The theory that ‘to be intelligible is to be found out’ seems to have frightened them. The books they issue are a series of ‘not-at-home’ cards—sort of P.P.C.’s on posterity. And the younger poets, too, belong to the last century, or they stand in the same relation to their immediate predecessors, to borrow one of your metaphors, as l’art nouveau does to Chippendale. Oh, for the days of Byron, Keats, and Shelley!

L. C. All of whom died before they were matured. You seem to resent development. In literature I am a mere dilettante. A fastidious reader, but not an expert. I know what I don’t like; but I never know what I shall like. At least twice a year I come across a book which gives me much pleasure. As it comes from the lending library it is never quite new. That is an added charm. If it happens to have made a sensation, the sensation is all over by the time it reaches me. The book has matured. A quite new book is always a little crude. It suggests an evening paper. There at least you will agree. But to come across a work which Henry James published, say, last year, is, I assure you, like finding a Hubert Van Eyck in the Brompton Road.

L. T. I wish I could share your enthusiasm, or that I could change places with you. Every year the personality of a new artist is revealed to you. I know you only pretend not to admire the modern school of painting. You find it a convenient pose. Your flora and your fauna are always receiving additions; while my garden is withered; my zoo is out of repair. The bars are broken; the tanks have run dry. There is hardly a trace of life except in the snake-house, and, as I mentioned, the last giraffe is dead.

L. C. Our friend, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, is fortunately able to give us a different account of the institution in Regent’s Park. You are quite wrong about modern painting. None of the younger men can paint at all. A few of them can draw, I admit. It is all they can do. The death of Charles Furse blasted all my hopes of English art. Whistler is dead; Sargent is an American.

L. T. Well, so is Henry James, if it comes to that. And so was Whistler. But I have seen the works of several young artists who I understand are carrying out the great traditions of painting. Ricketts, Shannon, Wilson Steer, Rothenstein, Orpen, Nicholson, Augustus John are surely worthy successors to Turner, Alfred Stevens, and the Pre-Raphaelites.

L. C. They are merely connoisseurs gifted with expressing their appreciation of the past in paint. They appeal to you as a literary man. You like to detect in every stroke of their brushes an echo of the past. Their pictures have been heard, not seen. All the younger artists are committing burglary on the old masters.

L. T. It is you who are a disappointed optimist.

L. C. Not about literature or the drama. I seem to hear, with Ibsen’s ‘Master Builder,’ the younger generation knocking at the door.

L. T. It comes in without knocking in my experience; and generally has fig-leaves in its hair—a decided advance on the coiffure of Hedda Gabler’s lover.

L. C. But look at Bernard Shaw.

L. T. Why should I look at Bernard Shaw? I read his plays and am more than ever convinced that he has gone on the wrong lines. His was the opportunity. He made il gran refuto. Some one said that George Saintsbury never got over the first night of Hernani. Shaw never recovered the premiÈre of Ghosts. He roofed our Thespian temple with Irish slate. His disciples found English drama solid brick and leave it plaster of Paris. Yet Shaw might have been another Congreve.

L. C. Troja fuit. We do not want another. I am sure you never went to the Court at all.

L. T. Oh, yes, I attended the last levÉe. But the drama is too large a subject, or, in England, too small a subject to discuss. We live, as Professor Mahaffy has reminded us, in an Alexandrian age. We are wounded with archÆology and exquisite scholarship, and must drag our slow length along . . . We were talking about literature. Where are the essayists, the Lambs, and the Hazlitts? I know you are going to say Andrew Lang; I say it every day; it is like an Amen in the Prayer-book; it occurs quite as frequently in periodical literature. He was my favourite essayist, during the last fifteen years of the last century. What is he now? An historian, a folk-lorist, an archÆologist, a controversialist. I believe he is an expert on portraits of Mary Stuart. You were going on to say G. K. Chesterton—

L. C. No. I was going to say Max Beerbohm. Some of his essays I put beside Lamb’s, and above Hazlitt’s. He has style; but then I am prejudiced because he is the only modern artist I really admire. He is a superb draughtsman and our only caricaturist. Then there is George Moore. I don’t care for his novels, but his essays are delightful. George Moore really counts. Few people know so little about art; yet how delightfully he writes about it. Everything comes to him as a surprise. He gives you the same sort of enjoyment as you would derive from hearing a nun preach on the sins of smart society.

L. T. Moore is one of many literary Acteons who have mistaken Diana for Aphrodite.

L. C. You mean he is great dear; but he gets hold of the right end of the stick.

L. T. And he generally soils it. But you know nothing about literature. The age requires blood and Kipling gave it Condy’s Fluid (drinks barley water). The age requires life, and Moore gave us a gallantee show from Montmartre (drinks barley water). Even I require life. To-morrow I am off to Aix.

L. C.—les Bains?

L. T. No, la-Chapelle!

L. C. Oh, then we shall probably meet. Thanks. I can get on my own overcoat. I shall probably be there myself in a few weeks.