“Form is art,” flashed Alistair, who saw through the visitor’s strategy, and felt maliciously disposed to balk him. It had always been an honourable understanding among the Decadents that they were to listen to each other’s poems and look at each other’s pictures, as some slight mutual compensation for the deafness and blindness of the middle class. But it seemed scarcely fair to extend the benefit of this arrangement to the poetry of the Catholic renascence.
Vane blinked, but recovered himself promptly.
“That is what I said. Form is art or its essence. For that reason it ought not to be concealed. In the acrostic form takes its right place as the governing condition of the whole.”
Wickham dutifully came to his brother’s reinforcement.
“That is why I find tapestry so far superior to painting,” he murmured. “The limitations of the needle are so much severer than those of the brush; their influence over the composition is so much more obvious. There is something vulgar in dexterity.”
“Is there not something vulgar in expression itself?” Stuart put in. “Surely the unexpressed is always higher than the expressed?”
This was a wedge driven between the opposing forces. Wickham, whose claims to consideration rested entirely on the meditations in which he was believed to indulge, could not reject the principle which justified his existence. Egerton, fretting with impatience, began to fear that he should be reduced to the coarse manœuvre of openly seizing his book and reading unasked.
But even this was not to be permitted him.
“For my part,” Stuart said, “I consider that as the first word of literature was the riddle, so it must be the last. Poetry is falsehood, and we should never be allowed to tell the truth. Remember that when Shakespeare ventured to talk poetry to Ben Jonson in the Mermaid Tavern, he ‘had to be stopped.’ The poet will always be stopped by respectable people when he talks prose, and that is why he has to talk poetry, which they can’t understand. Take my advice, throw your acrostics overboard, and write riddles. Write them in Sanskrit if possible, and use a cipher. That will give you all the limitations you want. And the middle class will form a Vane Society, as they have formed a Shakespeare Society and a Browning Society, to interpret you; and when you are dead they will write biographies to prove that you were fairly orthodox and perfectly respectable.”
The author of the “Rosary of Twilight,” as he walked home in dudgeon, observed to the fraternal satellite: