The Garden by the Sea chapter was to have gone on discursively with a
discussion upon this project of a conference upon the Mind of the
Race. The automobile-ful of gentlemen who had first arrived was to
have supplied the opening interlocutors, but presently they were to
have been supplemented by the most unexpected accessories. It would
have been an enormously big dialogue if it had ever been written, and
Boon's essentially lazy temperament was all against its ever getting
written. There were to have been disputes from the outset as to the
very purpose that had brought them all together. "A sort of literary
stocktaking" was to have been Mr. Archer's phrase. Repeated.
Unhappily, its commercialism was to upset Mr. Gosse extremely; he was
to say something passionately bitter about its "utter lack of
dignity." Then relenting a little, he was to urge as an alternative
"some controlling influence, some standard and restraint, a new and
better Academic influence." Dr. Keyhole was to offer his journalistic
services in organizing an Academic plebiscite, a suggestion which was
to have exasperated Mr. Gosse to the pitch of a gleaming silence.
In the midst of this conversation the party is joined by Hallery and
an American friend, a quiet Harvard sort of man speaking meticulously
accurate English, and still later by emissaries of Lord Northcliffe
and Mr. Hearst, by Mr. Henry James, rather led into it by a
distinguished hostess, by Mr. W. B. Yeats, late but keen, and by that
Sir Henry Lunn who organizes the Swiss winter sports hotels. All these
people drift in with an all too manifestly simulated accidentalness
that at last arouses the distrust of the elderly custodian, so that
Mr. Orage, the gifted editor of the _New Age_, arriving last, is
refused admission. The sounds of the conflict at the gates do but
faintly perturb the conference within, which is now really getting to
business, but afterwards Mr. Orage, slightly wounded in the face by a
dexterously plied rake and incurably embittered, makes his existence
felt by a number of unpleasant missiles discharged from over the wall
in the direction of any audible voices. Ultimately Mr. Orage gets into
a point of vantage in a small pine-tree overlooking the seaward corner
of the premises, and from this he contributes a number of comments
that are rarely helpful, always unamiable, and frequently in the worst
possible taste.
Such was Boon's plan for the second chapter of "The Mind of the Race."
But that chapter he never completely planned. At various times Boon
gave us a number of colloquies, never joining them together in any
regular order. The project of taking up the discussion of the Mind of
the Race at the exact point Mr. Mallock had laid it down, and taking
the villa by the sea for the meeting-place, was at once opposed by
Hallery and his American friend with an evidently preconcerted
readiness. They pointed out the entire democratization of thought and
literature that had been going on for the past four decades. It was no
longer possible to deal with such matters in the old aristocratic
country-house style; it was no longer possible to take them up from
that sort of beginning; the centre of mental gravity among the
English-speaking community had shifted socially and geographically;
what was needed now was something wider and ampler, something more in
the nature of such a conference as the annual meeting of the British
Association. Science left the gentleman's mansion long ago; literature
must follow it--had followed it. To come back to Mr. Lankester's Villa
by the sea was to come back to a beaten covert. The Hearst
representative took up a strongly supporting position, and suggested
that if indeed we wished to move with the times the thing to do was to
strike out boldly for a special annex of the Panama Exhibition at San
Francisco and for organization upon sound American lines. It was a
case, he said, even for "exhibits." Sir Henry Lunn, however, objected
that in America the Anglo-Saxon note was almost certain to be too
exclusively sounded; that we had to remember there were vigorous
cultures growing up and growing up more and more detachedly upon the
continent of Europe; we wanted, at least, their reflected lights ...
some more central position.... In fact, Switzerland ... where also
numerous convenient hotels ... patronized, he gathered from the
illustrated papers, by Lord Lytton, Mrs. Asquith, Mr. F. R. Benson ...
and all sorts of helpful leading people.