“And he’ll say that. Slowly. Steadily. Endlessly. Then he will thank God for the English classics, ask where now is our Thackeray? where now our Burns? our Charlotte Brontë? our Tennyson? say a good word for our immortal bard, and sit down amidst the loud applause of thousands of speechlessly furious British and American writers….”
“I don’t see that this will help your book forward,” said Dodd.
“No, but it’s a proper way of beginning. Like Family Prayers.”
“I suppose,” said Wilkins, “if you told a man of that sort that there were more and better poets writing in English beautifully in 1914 than ever before he wouldn’t believe it. I suppose if you said that Ford Madox Hueffer, for example, had produced sweeter and deeper poetry than Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he’d have a fit.”
“He’d have nothing of the kind. You could no more get such an idea into the head of one of these great vestiges of our Gladstonian days than you could get it into the seat of a Windsor chair…. And people don’t have fits unless something has got into them…. No, he’d reflect quite calmly that first of all he’d never heard of this Hueffer, then that probably he was a very young man. And, anyhow, one didn’t meet him in important places…. And after inquiry he would find out he was a journalist…. And then probably he’d cease to cerebrate upon the question….”
§ 3
“Besides,” said Boon, “we must have one of our literary peers because of America.”
“You’re unjust to America,” I said.
“No,” said Boon. “But Aunt Dove—I know her ways.”