“Good God!” burst out Annan, “—what has this to do with my novel——”
“It’s tainted. It’s infected with the cult of ugliness. So were your short stories in the Planet that gave you a name! You’re stained with modernism.”
“Damn it, I’m personally decent——”
“Some of the lunatics are, too. But the hullabaloo they’re making is bound to affect—and infect—impressionable minds. All healthy and creative minds are impressionable. Yours is. This satanic cult of ugliness has influenced your mind to more sombre, more incredulous, less wholesome creations.
“All genius is imitative in some degree. You don’t escape, Barry. The body-vermin of literature—the so-called modern critics—all are applauding you and tempting you to perpetuate more of that sinister ugliness which deformed your first work.
“Don’t do it. Remember the real standards. They never change; only fashion changes. Stick to the clean master-jobs of the real giants in your profession. Those are the standards. Life is splendid. Man is fine. The beauty of both are best worth recording in art. Leave degeneracy to medicine. Leave modernism to the asylum. Make the cleavage definite between art and science. Find your themes in goodness, in beauty, in the nobility of the human mind——”
“Good heavens, Mike, are you one of those moral fanatics who evoke blue-laws even for literature?”
Coltfoot slowly shook his head: “Barry, you won’t win out until you change your attitude toward the God who made you without a blemish. I’m telling you. The lunatic can’t last. The dirty, greedy, commercial Jew or Christian art dealer or publisher who exploits Satanism, Bolshevism, insanity, for the sake of dirty dollars,—he has his thirty pieces of silver. And that’s all.... I took mine—and published your stories. I’m through. I’m a he-Magdalen. I’m off that stuff.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve chucked the Planet,” said Coltfoot carelessly.