“Oh, I don’t know. A few words about the elevating nature of great works of art—particularly statues. You know the sort of thing I mean. How the English nation occupies the great position it does very largely because it flocks to the Royal Academy regularly every year. How the people of Ballymoy are opening up a new era for Ireland. But I needn’t go on. You must have heard him making speeches scores of times. That was all we wanted, and if we’d had the slightest idea that he was taking a lot of trouble to prepare a learned lecture we’d have told him that he needn’t.”
“But how could he make any speech about a General who never existed?”
“My dear Lord Alfred! What has the General got to do with it? We didn’t want a speech about him. We wanted one about his statue.”
“But it isn’t his statue. If there was no General there can’t be a statue to him.”
“There is,” said Dr. O’Grady. “There’s no use flying in the face of facts. The statue’s under that sheet.”
“It’s not. I mean to say that there may be a statue there, but it’s not to General John Regan. How can there be a statue to him when there was no such person?”
“Was there ever such a person as Venus?” said Dr. O’Grady. “There wasn’t. And yet every museum in Europe is half full of statues of her. Was there ever such a person as the Dying Gladiator? Was there ever a man called Laocoon, who strangled sea serpents? You know perfectly well that there weren’t any such people, and yet some of the most famous statues in the world are erected in memory of them.”
“But His Excellency naturally thought——”
“Look here,” said Dr. O’Grady, “if we’d asked him to unveil a statue of Hercules in Ballymoy, would he have gone round consulting the librarians of London and Oxford to find out whether there was such a person as Hercules or not? Would he have said he was insulted? Would he have sent you here to ask for an apology? You know perfectly well he wouldn’t.”
Lord Alfred seemed slightly puzzled. Dr. O’Grady’s line of argument was quite new to him. He felt sure that a fallacy underlay it somewhere, but he could not at the moment see what the fallacy was.