"On the contrary I believe I write as well as I can," said John, earnestly. "I admit that I gave up writing realistic novels, but that was because they didn't suit my temperament."
"No, by gad, they didn't! And, anyway, no Englishman can write a realistic novel—or any other kind of a novel if it comes to that. My lord, the English novel!"
"Look here," John protested. "I do not want to argue about either plays or novels to-night. But if you must talk about books, talk about your own, not mine. Beatrice wrote to me that you had something coming along about the French Symbolists. I shouldn't have thought that they would have appealed to you."
"They don't. I hate them."
"Well, why write a book about them? Their day has been over a long time."
"To smash them. To prove that they were a pretentious set of epileptic humbugs."
"Sort of Max Nordau business?"
"Max Nordau! I hope you aren't going to compare me with that flat-footed bus-conductor. No, no, Johnnie, the rascals took themselves seriously and I'm going to smash them on their own estimate of their own importance. I'm going to prove that they were on the wrong track and led nowhere."
"It's consoling to learn that even French literature can go off the lines sometimes."
"Of course it can, because it runs on lines. English literature on the contrary never had any lines on which to run, though in the eighteenth century it followed a fairly decent coaching-road. Modern English literature, however, is like a rogue elephant trampling down the jungle that its predecessors made some attempt to cultivate."