“Why thank goodness?”
“Because they walk about as though they owned the earth and the fatness thereof, as though the earth existed for them to walk about on it without their needing even to look at it to see how beautiful it is.”
“That’s like Logan,” he said. “He used always to be railing against the English. He said they had no eyes, only stomachs. But I think the English must be the nicest people in the world, for there is no place like London for living in.”
Indeed, they both thought there could be no place like London. Once or twice a week they dined together at the Pot-au-Feu and went on to a party or to a music-hall or to the cinema, which he adored. He said it gave him ideas for pictures and that there were often wonderful momentary pictures thrown on the screen.
“The cinema does what the bad artists have been trying to do for generations. It is a great relief to have it done by a machine. The artist need not any more try to be a machine. There is no need for him now to please the public. He can leave all that to the machine and go straight for art. The few decent people will follow him, and what more does he want? Art is not for the fools. . . . Logan was wrong. He wanted art to go to the people. That is all wrong. The people must come up to art. When they are sick of the machine, art is there, ready for them.” He added naïvely, “I shall be there, waiting for them.”
He loved especially the dramas, when they were not clogged and obscured with sentimentality. The simple values that governed them, the triumph of virtue and the downfall of evil, appealed to him as solid, as related to a process, a drama, that went on in himself, and, he supposed, in everybody else. It worried and annoyed him when Morrison made fun of these values and jeered at them.
“But things don’t work like that,” she protested.
“I think they do,” he said.
“Good people are often crushed,” she replied, “and bad people often have things all their own way.”