“Of all the consummately impertinent arguments!” laughed the man of letters. “You’re an arrant humbug, my dear Crowdie.”
“Since matter’s only humbug, I don’t mind,” rejoined the painter. “That’s unanswerable unless you throw up your theory—which you won’t, for I know you. So you’d better leave me and my art to do the best they can together.”
“It seems to me that Crowdie’s got rather the better of you,” observed Bright.
“Oh—he has. I always admit that the children of light haven’t a chance against the children of darkness.”
“That’s an argument ‘ad hominem,’ ” observed Crowdie. “It’s your way of throwing up the sponge.”
“Hit him again!” laughed Bright. “Turn the other theoretical cheek to the smiter, Griggs!”
“He’s afraid of me, all the same,” retorted Griggs. “These materialists are the most superstitious people alive. He believes that I learned all sorts of queer things in the East, and that I could roll up his shadow, like Peter Schlemil’s, and destroy his Totem, and generally make his life a burden to him by translating ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ into Arabic, and pouring ink into my hand, and all that. You know you do.”
“Yes,” answered Crowdie. “I confess that I’m what you call superstitious. I’m inclined to believe in things like magic and spells—like John Wellington Wells. Since your matter’s all a dream, it can’t take much to blur it, and make it move about and change and behave oddly. Oh, yes—I believe in the spirits of the four elements, and all that—or if I don’t, I’d like to.”
“What good would it do you?” asked Wingfield, bluntly.
“Good? It isn’t a question of good, it’s a question of beauty. I want to believe that beautiful things have a consciousness and a sort of power of their own, a special perishable soul—the sort of soul that Lucretius talks about. I’m quite willing to think that they may have an immortal soul, too, but what concerns me is the perishable one, that suffers and enjoys and speaks in the eyes and sighs in the voice.”