Mrs. Oliver gave Mrs. Le Moine tea. They all talked. Eileen had brought in with her a periodical she had been reading in the train, which had in it a poem by Billy Raymond. Arnold picked it up and read it, and said he was sorry about it. Eddy then read it and said, “I rather like it. Don’t you, Eileen? It’s very much Billy in a certain mood, of course.”
Arnold said it was Billy reacting with such violence against Masefield—a very sensible procedure within limits—that he had all but landed himself in the impressionist preciosity of the early Edwardians.
Eileen said, “It’s Billy when he’s been lunching with Cecil. He’s often taken like that then.”
The Dean said, “And who’s Cecil?”
Eileen said, “My husband,” and the Dean and Mrs. Oliver weren’t sure if, given one was living apart from one’s husband, it was quite nice to mention him casually at tea like that; more particularly when he had just written a censored play.
The Dean, in order not to pursue the subject of Mr. Le Moine, held out his hand for the Blue Review, and perused Billy’s production, which was called “The Mussel Picker.”
He laid it down presently and said, “I can’t say I gather any very coherent thought from it.”
Arnold said, “Quite. Billy hadn’t any just then. That is wholly obvious. Billy sometimes has, but occasionally hasn’t, you know. Billy is at times, though by no means always, a shallow young man.”
“Shallow young men produce a good deal of our modern poetry, it seems to me from my slight acquaintance with it,” said the Dean. “One misses the thought in it that made the Victorian giants so fine.”
As a good many of the shallow young producers of our modern poetry were more or less intimately known to his three guests, Arnold suspected the Dean of trying to get back on him for his aspersions on Philip Underwood. He with difficulty restrained himself from saying, gently but aloofly, a la Mrs. Oliver, “I always think it rather a pity to criticize writers who have helped so many people so very greatly as our Georgian poets have,” and said instead, “But the point about this thing of Billy’s is that it’s not modern in the least. It breathes of fifteen years back—the time when people painted in words, and were all for atmosphere. Surely whatever you say about the best modern people, you can’t deny they’re full of thought—so full that sometimes they forget the sound and everything else. Of course you mayn’t like the thought, that’s quite another thing; but you can’t miss it; it fairly jumps out at you.... Did you read John Henderson’s thing in this month’s English Review?”