"You know," I said, "that doesn't exactly represent----"
"Hush!" said Boon. "It was but a resting phase! And at this point I
part company with the 'Encyclopaedia.'"
"But you didn't get all that out of the 'Encyclopaedia'?"
"Practically--yes. I may have rearranged it a little. The
Encyclopaedist is a most interesting and representative person. He
takes up an almost eighteenth-century attitude, holds out hopes of a
revival of Taste under an Academy, declares the interest of the great
mass of men in literature is always 'empirical,' regards the great
Victorian boom in letters as quite abnormal, and seems to ignore what
you would call that necessary element of vitalizing thought.... It's
just here that Hallery will have to dispute with him. We shall have to
bring them together in our book somehow.... Into this impressive scene
of decline and the ebb of all thinking comes this fanatic Hallery of
ours, reciting with passionate conviction, 'the thought of a nation is
the life of a nation.' You see our leading effect?"
He paused. "We have to represent Hallery as a voice crying in the
wilderness. We have to present him in a scene of infinite intellectual
bleakness, with the thinnest scrub of second-rate books growing
contemptibly, and patches of what the Encyclopaedist calls
tares--wind-wilted tares--about him. A mournful Encyclopaedist like
some lone bird circling in the empty air beneath the fading stars....
Well, something of that effect, anyhow! And then, you know, suddenly,
mysteriously one grows aware of light, of something coming, of
something definitely coming, of the dawn of a great Literary
Revival...."
"How does it come?"
"Oh! In the promiscuous way of these things. The swing of the
pendulum, it may be. Some eminent person gets bored at the prospect of
repeating that rigmarole about the great Victorians and our present
slackness for all the rest of his life, and takes a leaf from one of
Hallery's books. We might have something after the fashion of the
Efficiency and Wake-up-England affair. Have you ever heard guinea-fowl
at dawn?"
"I've heard them at twilight. They say, 'Come back. Come back.' But
what has that to do with----"
"Nothing. There's a movement, a stir, a twittering, and then a sudden
promiscuous uproar, articles in the reviews, articles in the
newspapers, paragraphs, letters, associations, societies, leagues. I
imagine a very great personality indeed in the most extraordinary and
unexpected way coming in...." (It was one of Boon's less amiable
habits to impute strange and uncanny enterprises, the sudden adoption
of movements, manias, propagandas, adhesion to vegetarianism,
socialism, the strangest eccentricities, to the British royal family.)
"As a result Hallery finds himself perforce a person of importance.
'The thought of a nation is the life of a nation,' one hears it from
royal lips; 'a literature, a living soul, adequate to this vast
empire,' turns up in the speech of a statesman of the greatest
literary pretensions. Arnold White responds to the new note. The
_Daily Express_ starts a Literary Revival on its magazine page and
offers a prize. The _Times_ follows suit. Reports of what is afoot
reach social circles in New York.... The illumination passes with a
dawnlike swiftness right across the broad expanse of British life,
east and west flash together; the ladies' papers and the motoring
journals devote whole pages to 'New Literature,' and there is an
enormous revival of Book Teas.... That sort of thing, you
know--extensively."