“It’ll be the making of you, I suppose,” he said, “but it’s all wrong, Barry. Popular and punk!”
“Why the devil do you say that?”
“It is wrong.”
They were dining at Annan’s à deux, and had strolled into the living-room with their cigars.
“You sit down, Mike, and tell me why my book is popular and punk!” said Annan wrathfully.
Coltfoot dropped onto the piano stool, sounded a few dissonances evolved by a master-modernist; sneered.
“Barry,” he said, “if art isn’t wholesome it’s only near-art. What is good is also healthy. If art is good it is sane, always; and always beautiful.”
“I’ve heard that song you sing. It’s an ancient rag, Mike.”
“It’s real music, Barry—not this!—” he struck a series of dissonant, ugly, half-crazed chords from the most modern creation of the most modern of modernists. “That’s diseased,” he said. “There is no virtue, no beauty, no art in disease.”
“Of course,” remarked Annan, “I might mention ambergris, paté-de-fois-gras, the virtues of ergot, the play of colour, and the flower-like perfume of a dying grayling, and the——”