§ 2
Boon was greatly exercised over the problem of a president.
“Why have a president?” Dodd helped.
“There must be a Presidential Address,” said Boon, “and these things always do have a president.”
“Lord Rosebery,” suggested Wilkins.
“Lord Morley,” said Dodd.
“Lord Bryce.”
Then we looked at one another.
“For my own part,” said Boon, “if we are going in for that sort of thing, I favour Lord Reay.
“You see, Lord Reay has never done anything at all connected with literature. Morley and Bryce and Rosebery have at any rate written things—historical studies, addresses, things like that—but Reay has never written anything, and he let Gollancz make him president of the British Academy without a murmur. This seems to mark him out for this further distinction. He is just the sort of man who would be made—and who would let himself be made—president of a British affair of this sort, and they would hoist him up and he would talk for two or three hours without a blush. Just like that other confounded peer—what was his name?—who bored and bored and bored at the Anatole France dinner…. In the natural course of things it would be one of these literary lords….”
“What would he say?” asked Dodd.
“Maunderings, of course. It will make the book rather dull. I doubt if I can report him at length…. He will speak upon contemporary letters, the lack of current achievement…. I doubt if a man like Lord Reay ever reads at all. One wonders sometimes what these British literary aristocrats do with all their time. Probably he left off reading somewhere in the eighties. He won’t have noted it, of course, and he will be under the impression that nothing has been written for the past thirty years.”
“Good Lord!” said Wilkins.
“And he’ll say that. Slowly. Steadily. Endlessly. Then he will thank God for the English classics, ask where now is our Thackeray? where now our Burns? our Charlotte Brontë? our Tennyson? say a good word for our immortal bard, and sit down amidst the loud applause of thousands of speechlessly furious British and American writers….”
“I don’t see that this will help your book forward,” said Dodd.
“No, but it’s a proper way of beginning. Like Family Prayers.”
“I suppose,” said Wilkins, “if you told a man of that sort that there were more and better poets writing in English beautifully in 1914 than ever before he wouldn’t believe it. I suppose if you said that Ford Madox Hueffer, for example, had produced sweeter and deeper poetry than Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he’d have a fit.”
“He’d have nothing of the kind. You could no more get such an idea into the head of one of these great vestiges of our Gladstonian days than you could get it into the seat of a Windsor chair…. And people don’t have fits unless something has got into them…. No, he’d reflect quite calmly that first of all he’d never heard of this Hueffer, then that probably he was a very young man. And, anyhow, one didn’t meet him in important places…. And after inquiry he would find out he was a journalist…. And then probably he’d cease to cerebrate upon the question….”