L. T. It comes in without knocking in my experience; and generally has fig-leaves in its hair—a decided advance on the coiffure of Hedda Gabler’s lover.
L. C. But look at Bernard Shaw.
L. T. Why should I look at Bernard Shaw? I read his plays and am more than ever convinced that he has gone on the wrong lines. His was the opportunity. He made il gran
refuto. Some one said that George Saintsbury never got over the first night of Hernani. Shaw never recovered the première of Ghosts. He roofed our Thespian temple with Irish slate. His disciples found English drama solid brick and leave it plaster of Paris. Yet Shaw might have been another Congreve.
L. C. Troja fuit. We do not want another. I am sure you never went to the Court at all.
L. T. Oh, yes, I attended the last levée. But the drama is too large a subject, or, in England, too small a subject to discuss. We live, as Professor Mahaffy has reminded us, in an Alexandrian age. We are wounded with archæology and exquisite scholarship, and must drag our slow length along . . . We were talking about literature. Where are the essayists, the Lambs, and the Hazlitts? I know you are going to say Andrew Lang; I say it every day; it is like an Amen in the Prayer-book; it occurs quite as frequently in periodical literature. He was my favourite essayist, during the last fifteen years of the last century. What is he now? An historian, a folk-lorist, an archæologist, a controversialist.
I believe he is an expert on portraits of Mary Stuart. You were going on to say G. K. Chesterton—
L. C. No. I was going to say Max Beerbohm. Some of his essays I put beside Lamb’s, and above Hazlitt’s. He has style; but then I am prejudiced because he is the only modern artist I really admire. He is a superb draughtsman and our only caricaturist. Then there is George Moore. I don’t care for his novels, but his essays are delightful. George Moore really counts. Few people know so little about art; yet how delightfully he writes about it. Everything comes to him as a surprise. He gives you the same sort of enjoyment as you would derive from hearing a nun preach on the sins of smart society.
L. T. Moore is one of many literary Acteons who have mistaken Diana for Aphrodite.
L. C. You mean he is great dear; but he gets hold of the right end of the stick.