CHAPTER XIX
Wherein a Strutting Cock comes near to Losing a Feather upon his Own Dunghill
Ata table, with his disciples, sat Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre—a slack-headed, loose-lipped, colourless-haired, untidy-minded fellow enough to outward seeming.
As Noll listened to his affected voice and caught the tenor of his mind he understood why the man was known amongst the robuster wits as The Brixton Celt.
Sitting next to him, and admiring himself in a mirror opposite, was his friend the poet Aubrey, who, it must be acknowledged, paid but little attention to anyone but himself. As Noll entered the place Myre’s loud drawl was giving utterance to the innuendo that the love of woman was only worth the seeking in order “to take her soul up by the roots and examine it”; on which Aubrey had raised a laugh somewhat at his own cost and yet with a certain vague undefined loss to the Quogge Myre, by saying:
“I personally am content to take up my own soul by the roots and examine it.”
When the ironic applause and laughter were run down, Aubrey, still gazing at himself, said:
“That laugh is sheer affected hypocrisy. I am of the only importance—that is the only real heart’s creed of man.” And he added lovingly: “I thank God that I am beautiful—very beautiful.”
It was a historic night....
Quogge Myre had been irked of late by the perpetual reference to him as the English Zola. He felt that he ought to be original. He saw that he must again strike a new and original note. Above all he felt that Realism was running dry—the public were grown used to it; nay, worse, the public had accepted it at his estimate.
On this evening he had planned the surprise of a great Renunciation. One or two sonnets had been given by poets, as was the custom in Parisian students’ taverns, before Myre himself arose to read an essay he had just written, and thus give to the privileged few the advantage of the earliest communion with his latest thought.
He astounded them that were gathered about him by attackingZola and Realism with bitterness; and he solemnly announced his decision to break with the movement for ever.
All these little men stared aghast—they had only just acquired the style and method and some little vogue upon their capture of the tricks of this very Realism. And for a few moments they were dumbfounded.
Had they not “written each other up” on their mastery of this very craft!
Even they, like Myre, had discovered that the superficial tricks were easily captured.
But, as Myre read, they began to glow, as though in some measure sharing in his greatness—he put that hint to them with subtlety.
It was that famous essay in which he showed, once for all, with aggressive air as though the prophet of the gospel, that Realism was a Failure—that all Art must be symbolical. Though he still maintained that the expression of it must be of the hammered and perfect metal called Style, he had overstated the case for style—but he did not withdraw everything. He had said that Style was the All in All—that the matter did not matter. He renounced that position. Style was important, but it was the symbols that were significant in art.... Then this man, who baldly stated how he had thrust himself upon Zola, proceeded to tell how he had tricked Zola into giving him the advertisement of his praise, how he had lied to him, how he now despised him, because Zola, being grown rich, wrote in a room that was a bourgeois ideal of handsome furnishing. He employed all his sarcasm on making ridiculous what only the genial hospitality of the kindly Frenchman could have thrown open to his treacherous censure; and he ended with a scalding attack on the coarseness of Zola’s work and on the lack of its artistry. For himself—he had discovered a greater master, whose name was Ibsen. “In so far as my work has unwittingly been symbolical,” said he, with the majesty of a great renunciation, “in so far has it been good. For the rest, it has been written in vain....” To achieve the masterpiece, he was content to go to the Greeks—to Æschylus, to Euripides, to Aristophanes, to Sophocles in drama, to Homer in the Epic, to Phidias in art—the Greeks, he averred, recorded only the Inevitable Thing.
As the great man sat down amidst a thunder of applause, Noll leaned over to a pimpled disciple:
“Tell me,” said he—“what has this man done?”
The youth gazed at him:
“Oh, it isn’t that he has done anything yet,” he said. “That will come. He has the right attitude.”
The pimply young man blew out cigarette smoke.
Netherby Gomme rose to his feet:
“I should like to ask our Master,” said he, without trace of smile on his cadaverous face, “and I ask it because I have only read Sophocles in the translation—to which of the plays of Sophocles did he allude when he burst into his splendid eulogyof the Greek genius just now—Œdipus Tyrannus, orAjaxorHecuba, or was he thinking of thePrometheus Bound?”
Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre licked his puffy red lips uncomfortably, but said nothing. He smiled cynically to cover his hesitation—the fact was that he had never read a play by Sophocles, even in translation. There was a long tense pause.
“Sophocles had the right attitude inallhis plays,” he said at last—“what is true of one is true of all.”
Netherby sat down, and laughed loud and long:
“Spoken like a game-cock!” cried he—“if a game-cock could sing——”
Noll touched his sleeve confidentially:
“But, Netherby,” said he—“Sophocles did not writePrometheus Bound. It was——”
“Hush, Noll—the ass hasn’t the smallest idea of that——”
Myre was uneasy, feeling he had not been wholly secure, when all eyes turned upon the entry into the café of a very beautiful young woman.
She walked to a small table and sat down.
Myre at once became hysterical; and proceeded to embarrass the girl with his vulgar eyes.
She ordered some coffee of the waiter, and, fretted by the admiring stare of these gentlemen, soon rose from the table, shortened her skirts above her dainty ankles, and went out into the night.
Myre, offended by the girl’s ignoring, said:
“The amateur is sapping the arts of all strength. The county gentry are destroying painting and the drama. That woman is an exquisite stick on the stage—she is connected with a peer.”
“Not by marriage, I suppose,” said a handsome youth flippantly; and rising from his chair with Byronic gloom, he put on his silk hat—“I must follow her; she is very beautiful.”
He followed her.
When he was gone, the pimply young man leaned over to Noll, and said with hushed admiration:
“Bartholomew Doome—the wickedest man in London.”
“Indeed,” said Noll—“what does he do?”
“He has never been known to give way to a decent emotion,” said the youth....
The next day, Mr. Myre bought a translation of the plays of Sophocles, and armed himself against his disciples. A cold sweat broke out upon him as he paid the price and realized how near he had come to losing his wits on his own particular dunghill.