‘Not until you came to yourself in a revulsion of feeling, my friend,’ sneered Julien Renaud.
‘Has any one seen Henri Lemaître since the night we drank our Scotch tod-dy, Anatole, and sang, or tried to sing, Les Temps Jadis?’ asked Dr. Vermont.
‘No. He was last heard of in Japan, studying the gentle art of self-defence, as practised by the gentle Japanese. He derided the duel, and loathed European pugilism, and he thought something might be done towards a more civilised settlement of disputes by borrowing of the remoter civilisation of the land of the chrysanthemum. What will you? Did he not study the washy water-colours of the immortal Monsieur Loti?’
‘Oh, an affection for Pierre Loti would explain any absurdity!’ said Gaston Favre, with a grim smile. ‘If we could hope to sit here a hundred years hence, and make a summary of the gods of the coming century, I wonder what sort of intellectual company should we have under discussion.’
‘Finished humbugs, I dare swear,’ shouted Anatole. ‘Already, from force of mere good writing, we have fallen upon intellectual inanition. The last century wound up by unveiling the goddess of reason; we’ve unveiled the goddess of form, and the devil swallow me, if there is anything to be found behind our excellent style. Each light of a new school sounds a loud trumpet to inform the world that he has at last discovered truth. So does a silly hen who lays an ordinary egg, the counterpart of her fellow-hen’s. You can’t convince her of the fatuous impertinence of her cackle, nor prove to her that there is nothing particularly great in the laying of eggs. I declare, nowadays, every trumpery artist and scribbler takes himself as seriously as the hen, and divides his time between laying and cackling.’
‘Each one has his theory, and it is more important that he should reveal that theory to the public than even paint his picture, write his play, or novel, or story upon it. So much has America taught him by means of that strange institution, the interviewer.’
‘Ah,’ cried Anatole, in a burst of exaggerated despair, ‘I gave up France when she took the American interviewer to her bosom, and the best papers were not ashamed to give us the opinions of the latest Minister, and expose the lack of taste and modesty in the youngest Master.’
‘Not France alone, mon cher,’ interposed Dr. Vermont; ‘English journalism has become no whit less vulgar and personal. Vulgarity, ostentation, fraud, rapacious advertisement—these are all the symptoms of the great moral disease of the century. Were a Lycurgus to rise up for each state, I doubt if the nations of the earth would have the wisdom to return to frugality, courage, and simplicity—so much have we lost by the long race of civilisation, so much our superiors were the old Pagan Spartans, and so dead are we to all promptings of delicacy,—without moral or physical value, without even valour.’
The Doctor spoke dejectedly, as if the hope of all good had died within him. The young men suddenly remembered that they, too, were weighted with a like lassitude and unbelief, and finished their punch in silence.
‘I expect we shall see the century out in a lugubrious spirit,’ sighed Anatole, when, upon a sign from Dr. Vermont, the waiter had replenished their glasses.