May left the two friends together, and went off to pay some calls, and in her absence Manvers talked more freely. He had felt something of a traitor in her grey eyes when he had said that the Demeter was not in his line.
“It’s the best thing you’ve ever done, Tom,” he said, handing the statuette respectfully. “It really is abominably good, from the top of the forage cap down to the bootlace tag, and that bottom of the trouser rucking up slightly over the other boot is an inspiration. You really are an unfortunate devil to be saddled with the grand style. As for that horror in the studio—you call my things horrors, so why shouldn’t I call yours?—the sooner you pitch it out of the window the better. Not that I don’t think it good—I think it is admirable—and as I said, almost perfectly Greek, but it simply won’t do. If you are to do anything nowadays you must be intelligible—that is to say, modern. You must not produce exercises, however good, in an art that is past. You are like those estimable people—I think they are archdeacons as a rule—who are always writing Latin translations in elegiac verses of ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’ in the pages of the Guardian. Nobody cares for interesting survivals. Why should they? People will not cudgel their brains to see what things mean. You have to label them!”
“Yes, you have to label a thing like La Dame qui s’amuse,” said Tom, “or else no one would know whether it was meant for a woman of fashion or a cocotte.”
“No, I don’t mean that,” said Manvers. “I don’t care what they call it, but you must make them understand the spirit of the thing. The spirit of Demeter is out of date. But that boy shooting is intelligible. Any one can see how good it is, and yet somehow it is not vulgar. To be vulgar is to be popular. You haven’t seen my ballet girl dancing. It is incomparably vulgar. I think it is the vulgarest thing I ever saw, and I’m not boasting when I say all Paris raves about it.”
“All Paris!” broke in Tom; “all the cities of the plain!”
“Not at all: all the most civilized people of the most civilized town in the world. You really had better smash the Demeter. What will you do with her? They will probably take her at the Academy—in fact, I should think they certainly would, and in the autumn they will send her back to you, or rather you will have to go with a drayman’s cart and fetch her. She’ll be very heavy. If you were an academician, and got a very good piece of Carrara for her, Pears might buy her, ‘after using our soap,’ you know.”
Tom grew more and more impatient, and could contain himself no longer.
“Don’t talk blasphemy here!” he shouted. “The only object of art, according to you, is to make fifty silly women look at the abortions you produce for five minutes while they are racking their brainless heads for a new piece of scandal. You are welcome to them. And if no one else cares for my Demeter, May does, and the rest of the world may go to the deuce for all we care. You are a rank heretic, and when you die you will go to a place entirely peopled with the types you love, while I shall sit at wine with gods and goddesses.”
“What will happen to your other people? The boy shooting, for instance?”
“If he shows so much as the muzzle of his ugly gun, I shall kick him downstairs to join you and your fellows.”