‘All modern schools but one are execrable,’ returned Ponto, with a grinding of the teeth and a waving of the hand. ‘It is enough for us to pronounce that they are not—Art! In approaching them we do not criticise—we simply obliterate; we crush, as we crush a reptile or an unclean thing. The man who denies absolute perfection to Potts, or universal mastery to Blanco Serena, at once proclaims, not merely his incompetence to speak on any artistic subject whatever, but by inference his moral degradation as a human being. We wave him from our vision—we wipe him out. He is a loathsome Philistine, an outcast, physically and intellectually abominable. Such a man once said, in my hearing, that “Mademoiselle de Maupin” was not the purest, wholesomest, most supremely sane and salutary book produced since the Divine Comedy, and that, on the whole, he preferred Wordsworth to Gautier as a moral teacher. My whole soul revolted. I shrank from that man with a shudder, and I am convinced that the wretch is ethically lost and intellectually paralytic.’
The Frenchman shook his head dolefully, as over some sad chronicle of human wickedness or sorrow. Serena laughed and turned with twinkling eyes to the excited critic.
‘Confess between ourselves that “Mademoiselle de Maupin” is not virile. For my own part, I never read it without feeling as if I had been slobbered over by a dirty baby.’
‘For God’s sake, Serena,’ cried Ponto, ‘don’t talk like that. I know you don’t mean it, but the very expression is worthy that infernal scoundrel MacAlpine. Not virile? Certainly not, and Heaven forbid! Virility, dear master, is coarseness, ugliness, rudeness, and hideousness. Is a rose-leaf virile? Are sweet shawms, exquisite scents, forlorn pulsations, and cadences of sexless and impotent desire, are these virile? The book of which we speak has been exquisitely called by a contemporary the Golden Book of spirit and sense; nay more, “The Holy Writ of Beauty!” In every page of it we feel the swooning consciousness, the stinging and slaying scourge, of fruitless and rootless passion, and the divine dew of incommunicable and luminous lust watering the spent fibres of a parched and palpitating aesthetic dream. We feel more! We feel that in realising this swoon of sensuous yet despairing pain, sharp as tears, bitter as brine, and sinuous as the serpent, and in falling back like a fountain to the ground from the heaven of eternally unsatisfied longing and delight, we penetrate to the central mystery of life, and see the white heart of the great rose of being pulsating with one melodious throb of self-satiating and non-virile bliss!’
Serena yawned, for he had heard all this before, and he was not particularly interested. As for the Frenchman, he listened and applauded, with many shrugs and smiles, but there was a lurking expression in his cat-like eye which showed that he was not altogether blind to the absurdity of the fatuous Ponto.
It is not our intention further to place on record the lucubrations of this typical critic of the period. The reader is doubtless familiar with the kind of criticism of which he and such as he are the mouthpieces. It has, perhaps, one redeeming merit—that of earnestness and thoroughness—and even its characteristic nepotism should not blind us to the fact that it reveals the existence of a real aspiration.
Arm-in-arm, Ponto and Gavrolles presently sallied forth, leaving Serena to enjoy his quiet meerschaum alone. As they went, the Frenchman was loud in praise of the painter, of his mighty genius and unassuming ways.
‘But this “Ophelia” whom he has painted,’ he cried presently, ‘is she so fair as that?’
Ponto confessed that he seldom went to the theatre, and he had not seen the original.
‘Ah, I am interested much,’ cried the other. ‘I must see her, I must know her, when I return to London.’