P.E. Can't see that that's anything to shout about. What's his platform, anyway?
L.E. Platform? To anyone who has tho slightest acquaintance with Applecart the very idea of a platform is fantastic. He doesn't stand; he soars.
P.E. Well, what are his views, then? Pretty tall, I suppose, if he's such a high flier.
L.E. You may well say so. In the first place he discards all the old artistic formulæ.
P.E. I know; you write a solid slab of purple prose, scissor it into a jig-saw puzzle, serve it with a dazzle dressing and call it the New Poetry.
L.E. Have your joke, if you will. But, more important still, Applecart is a rebel against humanity and all its fetishes, social, ethical and political.
P.E. (startled). A Bolshie, I suppose you mean?
L.E. The artist is proof against all these vulgar terms of abuse, culled from the hustings. Call him a Pussyfoot as well; you cannot shake him from his pinnacle.
P.E. Yes, but look here—he's just the sort of pernicious agitator we're out against in The Crisis—at least in my department. My special article this morning—three thickly-leaded columns—actually revealed the existence of a most insidious plot to undermine the restraining influence of the House of Lords by the spread of Bolshevik propaganda masquerading as literature. You see, there's a certain section of the Lords, mainly new creations who've only recently been released from various employments, who now for the first time in their lives have leisure for reading; then there's the spread of education among the sporting Peers. Well, these people are ready to succumb to all sorts of poisonous doctrines, if they're served up in what I presume to be the fashionable mode of the moment; and I expect your precious Applecart is one of the Bolsh agents who are laying the trap. You'll have to stop booming him, you know. He's not doing the paper any good.
L.E. My dear Sir, literature takes no account of the fads and fancies of party politics. And I gather from you that party politics have no use for literature except from a propagandist view. Let us be content to go our own ways in peace.