Lord Thorley had made an inconspicuous entry during this monologue, and, after a rather incomprehensible greeting on the part of Mr. Bellingham, who hailed him as “our dear lantern,” joined the circle. This salutation was soon explained, for with a wealth of delicate and elusive imagery, Mr. Bellingham made it moderately clear that Lord Thorley’s intellect was the light that would illuminate the future for them. “No will-of-the-wisp, my dear friend,” he handsomely concluded, “but the beam of the steadfast lighthouse on menacing and broken seas. Tell us, then, ever so lightly indicate to us, that which for the incomparable brightness of your revolving reflectors that cast pencils of imperishable light—in fact, my dear Thorley, what do you make of the future as in the hands of the rising generation?”
Lord Thorley weighed his pince-nez a moment in his open hand.
“Really, there seems an epidemic of inquiry about that matter,” said he. “Only just now Lady Grote and I were discussing it.”
“I curse myself, I pour dust on my head, for not, in fact, coming by an earlier train,” said Mr. Bellingham.
“We disagreed,” began Lord Thorley.
“And I missed the chance of observing the exquisite thrust and riposte of those incomparable gladiators. Another round, I beseech you for another round, or at least the report of the contest.”
“Well, Helen was all for our being in a melting-pot, and in her richly-mixed metaphor wondered what kind of soup would come out of it. I cannot see that we are in a melting-pot at all, or in the soup, either. Every generation, so I ventured to suggest, has always fancied it lived in critical times: memoirs prove that. But the crisis passes, and except for the memoirs subsequent generations would never imagine there had been one.”
“But, in fact,” said Bellingham, “sometimes surely, as at the end of the eighteenth century, it was not only in memoirs subsequently proved guilty of wild exaggeration that France—in short, I allude to the French Revolution.”
“I am disposed even to dispute that. The French Revolution was not really a great event: it was only the last chapter of a process that had been going on for fifty years. And, again, as we were talking of the young generation, it is important to remember that it was not the young who had their hands on the levers. I don’t think the young, with the exception perhaps of poets, ever do anything much. Ibsen, is it not, tells us in one of his practically unreadable plays that the young are knocking at the door? That is as far as they get. They knock at the door and run away like mischievous street boys. They do not, as a matter of fact, come in till they have ceased to be young.”
“Our dear lantern, in fact,” remarked Mr. Bellingham, “shows us a calm sea and children playing on the sand. But I doubt whether it is not the peacefulness of your own effulgence, my dear Thorley, that makes the object on which it plays partake of the same serene quality.”