“What book?” asked Dodd.
“This one we are in. All through this book you keep on at the idea of the Mind of the Race. It is what the book is about; it is its theme. Yet I don’t see exactly what you are driving at. Sometimes you seem to be making out this Mind of the Race to be a kind of God——”
“A synthetic God,” said Boon. “If it is to be called a God at all.”
Dodd nodded as one whose worst suspicions are confirmed.
“Then one has to assume it is a continuing, coherent mind, that is slowly becoming wider, saner, profounder, more powerful?”
Boon never likes to be pressed back upon exact statements. “Yes,” he said reluctantly. “In general—on the whole—yes. What are you driving at?”
“It includes all methods of expression from the poster when a play is produced at His Majesty’s Theatre, from the cheering of the crowd when a fireman rescues a baby, up to—Walter Pater.”
“So far as Pater expresses anything,” said Boon.
“Then you go on from the elevation this idea of a secular quasi-divine racial mental progress gives you, to judge and condemn all sorts of decent artistic and literary activities that don’t fall in or don’t admit that they fall in….”
“Something of that idea,” said Boon, growing a little testy—“something of that idea.”