“They don’t. Their canvases are blank. Then there are the Combinationists. They don’t repudiate color, but they repudiate paint. The most famous Combinationist picture exhibited so far consisted of half a match-box, a piece of orange-peel, and some sealing-wax, all stuck upon a slip of sugar-paper. The other Combinationists wanted to commit suicide because they despaired of surpassing it. Roger Cadbury wrote a superb introduction, pointing out that it must be either liked or disliked, but that it was impossible to do both or neither. It was that picture which inspired Hezekiah Penny to write what is considered one of his finest poems. You know it, perhaps?
“Why do I sing?
There is no reason why I should continue:
This image of the essential bin is better
Than the irritated uvulas of modern poets.
That caused almost as great sensation as the picture, because some of his fellow-poets maintained that he had no right to speak for anybody but himself.”
“Who is Hezekiah Penny?” Sylvia asked.
“Hezekiah Penny is a provincial poet who began by writing Provençal verse.”
“But this is madness,” Sylvia exclaimed, looking round her at the studio, where the representatives of modernity eyed one another with surprise and distaste like unusual fish in the tank of an aquarium. “Behind all this rubbish surely something truly progressive exists. You’ve deliberately invited all the charlatans and impostors to meet me. I tell you, Ronnie, I saw lots of pictures in New York that were eccentric, but they were striving to rediscover life in painting. You’re prejudiced because you belong to the decade before all this, and you’ve taken a delight in showing me all the extravagant side of it. You should emulate Tithonus.”
“Who was he?”
“Now don’t pretend you can’t follow a simple allusion. The gentleman who fell in love with Aurora.”
“Didn’t he get rather tired of living forever?”
“Oh, well, that was because he grew a beard like you. Don’t nail my allusions to the counter; they’re not lies.”