CHAPTER XVIII
Of the Coming of Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre upon the Town
Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myrehad caught the ear of the town with the brazen strains of the New Literary Movement. Fresh from France, he had written a novel, Englished in the French idiom, and founded on the closely detailed, elaborately seen, unselected picture of life as it straggles by, that is called Realism—that movement which, combined with splendid courage, had lifted Zola to the front rank in contemporary French literature. Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre had all the faults without the genius of the Frenchman; and, by consequence of these things, Mr. Myre had tasted the sweets of his first success of scandal. People had said that his book was indecent—and read it.
Mr. Myre had then struck one of his master-strokes, and straightway set himself up as lawgiver and head and front of Taste by criticising everybody and everything. And with a quick receptive mind for the catchpennies, the slang, and the cant of the studios and of the students’ quarter, of the stage and of the literary schools, he had picked up the details of every movement in the restless air of Paris; and he now proceeded to exploit them in London. That one thing flatly contradicted another gave him no embarrassment—he was there to harass and embarrass. Conventional critics went down before the cocksureness which was the flashy weapon of this, to them, most original man. The erratic amongst the journalists, they that live on the jigging foot, quick to see the vogue of this catchpenny-monger, were soon hard at it, too, seeking to gather in whilst the harvest was for the gathering, rushing to nature, or what their cockney senses told them was nature, so that when they conjured up the vision of the ploughman in the fields one perceived the sourness of his sweat rather than the fragrance of the earth or the mystic significance that is in the ploughing.
But Myre founded his eminence on no single dunghill. He set his building on a more certain base—he thrust down hissplay feet firm into popular Romance, and he saw to it that the whole whispering world should not miss it. He was living with one of the greatest French actresses of the day—and from Marguerite Olmé it must be set down in credit to his judgment he was catching a reflected glory that was far greater than his own.
Given boon companions, Myre was wont to make no secret of the fact, nay, rather a pretty confidence of it, that he was exploiting a great passion—“taking up a great woman’s soul by the roots to examine it,” was the florid paraphrase.
Art, said he, demanded every sacrifice.
That his extravagances were largely paid out of her bread-winnings he did not parade—as smacking perhaps of the too sordid. Realism has its limits. All nature is not to be crammed into an ink-pot nor three hundred pages.
Marguerite Olmé had come to play in England for three weeks. The French critics had set down her genius as the greatest of the age. In England, few people understanding her, this verdict had been enthusiastically repeated; and after a triumphant procession through the United States, where she was understood still less, it was written down that she was even greater than that. And indeed she was little less.
Meanwhile, Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre increased in violence and in volume, magnified by the reflected light; and his conceit grew ecstatic.
He made his enemies. They called him Quogge Myre, for short, or The Brixton Celt. There was some spite in it.
This at first fretted him somewhat. He had always been distressed that his name was only of one syllable—Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Milton, Chaucer, Balzac were of two.
Still, there was Poe!
He tried his own name on his tongue. He wondered if it could ever sound like the name of a man of genius.
Then there came to him a sudden glow—it was more original.
He felt that the time was come to gather in disciples; he chose a foreign restaurant, in the French quarter where, he darkly hinted in the press, and to all and sundry, that the wits might be seen of an evening, glittering resplendent. It was at this time that he gave forth the now famous essay in which he showed once for all how the home life checked the range of genius; in which he proved how the wifelymilieustunted the view and narrowed the eagle flight of the original intellect; that same essay in which he showed that a woman should be well content to be simply beautiful, relying on man’s chivalry for her sufficient empire; in which he also proved beyond shadow of doubt that it was due to the meeting of the wits in the tavern and the resulting whetting of the national genius that the French achievement so far transcended the English—indeed, he pointed the moral in a florid picture of Shakespeare glittering atthe Sign of the Mermaid—he even invented some lines for Shakespeare.
The tavern club was like to be born again.
Netherby Gomme, seeing the inquisitive mind of the lad Noll beginning to run upon the literary warfare of the day, set Noll’s heart jigging one evening by calling for him, together with the airy Fluffy Reubens, and taking him out into the London night to spend an hour or two at the great man’s tavern.