Curtain.
THE JADED INTELLECTUALS. A Dialogue.
Scene: The Smoking-room of the Elivas Club.
Characters: Laudator Temporeys, ætat. 54, a distinguished literary critic, and Luke Cullus, a rich connoisseur of art and life. They are not smoking nor drinking spirits. One is sipping barley water, the other Vichy.
Luke Cullus. You are a dreadful pessimist!
Laudator Temporeys. Alas! there is no such thing in these days. We are merely disappointed optimists. When Walter Pater died I did not realise that English literature expired. Yet the event excited hardly any interest in the Press. Our leading weekly, the Spectator, merely mentioned that Brasenose College, Oxford, had lost an excellent Dean.
L. C. I can hardly understand you. Painting, I admit, is entirely a lost art, so far as England is concerned. The death of Burne-Jones
brought our tradition to an end. I see no future for any of the arts except needlework, of which, I am told, there is a hopeful revival. But in your fields of literature, what a number of great names! How I envy you!
L. T. Who is there?
L. C. Well, to take the novelists first: you have the great Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Maurice Hewlett . . . I can’t remember the names of any others just at present. Then take the poets: Austin Dobson, my own special favourite; and among the younger men, A. E. Housman, Laurence Housman, Yeats, Arthur Symons, Laurence Binyon, William Watson—