‘You’ll find some spicy writing there,’ said Crieff. ‘A little out of date now, of course, for the new society journals have killed the “Satyrnine,” but it used to be deucedly clever.’
‘Clever!’ echoed Sutherland. ‘During the whole of last evening, and for hours this morning, I have been searching these volumes in vain for one spark of insight, for a ray of pure talent. They are simply trash, and spiteful trash, which is the worst of all.’
‘Perhaps you expect too much, old fellow. The “Satyrnine” only professes to be smart.’
‘I hate that word, though it expresses well enough the journalism we speak of—the journalism of the “Satyr,” who now wears fine clothes and calls himself a gentleman, but is at the best a production of literature’s slimy deposits—a Faun, earth-grubbing, ugliness-loving, screeching at the mysteries of artistic sunlight and moonlight. Even your friend Lagardère’s style is better—it makes no hideous pretences.’
‘Come, I’m glad you see some merit in Lagardère, after all!’
‘But this rubbish’—here he touched the volume contemptuously with his foot—‘this rubbish, in its horrible baseness and unintelligence, has not even the redeeming quality of honesty. The writers are ignorant, but they are also vicious; uninstructed, but at the same time pertinacious. Who are these men? Does any one know them? I should be curious, for example, to see the goatfooted animal who wrote this article on Thackeray.’
‘Well, you see,’ answered Crieff, reflectively, ‘they rather make a point of working in the dark, keeping up a mystery, so to speak; but nowadays, when the journal has gone downhill, and spicier papers like the “Plain Speaker” have practically killed it, the “Satyrnines” are better known than they used to be.’
‘Are they persons of reputation?’
‘Well, no; of course not.’
‘Gentlemen?’