“You decided,” she said.
“So did you, Dulcie. It was a unanimous decision. Because we both concluded that some among the Victorians were full of that sweet, clean sanity which alone endures. You recollect how our decision started?”
“Yes. It was about my new pleasure in Tennyson, Browning, Morris, Arnold, and Swinburne.”
“Exactly. Victorian poets, if sometimes a trifle stilted and self-conscious, wrote nobly; makers of Victorian prose displayed qualities of breadth, imagination and vision and a technical cultivation unsurpassed. The musical compositions of that epoch were melodious and sometimes truly inspired; never brutal, never vulgar, never degenerate. And the Victorian sculptors and painters—at first perhaps austerely pedantic—became, as they should be, recorders of the times and customs of thought, bringing the end of the reign of a great Queen to an admirable renaissance.”
Dulcie’s grey eyes never left his. And if she did not quite understand every word, already the dawning familiarity with his vocabulary and a general comprehension of his modes of self-expansion permitted her to follow him.
“A great Queen, a great reign, a great people,” he rambled on, painting away all the while. “And if in that era architecture declined toward its lowest level of stupidity, and if taste in furniture and in the plastic, decorative, and textile arts was steadily sinking toward its lowest ebb, and if Mrs. Grundy trudged the Empire, paramount, dull and smugly ferocious, while all snobbery saluted her and the humble grovelled before her dusty brogans, yet, Dulcie, it was a great era.
“It was great because its faith had not been radically impaired; it was sane because Germany had not yet inoculated the human race with its porcine political vulgarities, its bestial degeneracy in art.... And if, perhaps, the sentimental in British art and literature predominated, thank God it had not yet been tainted with the stark ugliness, the swinish nakedness, the ferocious leer of things Teutonic!”
He continued to paint in silence for a while. Presently the Prophet yawned on Dulcie’s knees, displaying a pink cavern.