Meanwhile Boon's plan was to make Mr. George Moore and Mr. Henry James
wander off from the general dispute, and he invented a dialogue that
even at the time struck me as improbable, in which both gentlemen
pursue entirely independent trains of thought.
Mr. Moore's conception of the projected symposium was something rather
in the vein of the journeyings of Shelley, Byron, and their charming
companions through France to Italy, but magnified to the dimensions of
an enormous pilgrimage, enlarged to the scale of a stream of refugees.
"What, my dear James," he asked, "is this mind of humanity at all
without a certain touch of romance, of adventure? Even Mallock
appreciated the significance of _frou-frou_; but these fellows behind
here...."
To illustrate his meaning better, he was to have told, with an
extraordinary and loving mastery of detail, of a glowing little
experience that had been almost forced upon him at Nismes by a pretty
little woman from Nebraska, and the peculiar effect it had had, and
particularly the peculiar effect that the coincidence that both
Nebraska and Nismes begin with an "N" and end so very differently, had
had upon his imagination....
Meanwhile Mr. James, being anxious not merely to state but also to
ignore, laboured through the long cadences of his companion as an
indefatigable steam-tug might labour endlessly against a rolling sea,
elaborating his own particular point about the proposed conference.
"Owing it as we do," he said, "very, very largely to our friend Gosse,
to that peculiar, that honest but restless and, as it were, at times
almost malignantly ambitious organizing energy of our friend, I cannot
altogether--altogether, even if in any case I should have taken so
extreme, so devastatingly isolating a step as, to put it violently,
_stand out_; yet I must confess to a considerable anxiety, a kind of
distress, an apprehension, the terror, so to speak, of the kerbstone,
at all this stream of intellectual trafficking, of going to and fro,
in a superb and towering manner enough no doubt, but still essentially
going to and fro rather than in any of the completed senses of the
word _getting there_, that does so largely constitute the aggregations
and activities we are invited to traverse. My poor head, such as it is
and as much as it can and upon such legs--save the mark!--as it can
claim, must, I suppose, play its inconsiderable part among the wheels
and the rearings and the toots and the whistles and all this uproar,
this--Mm, Mm!--let us say, this _infernal_ uproar, of the occasion;
and if at times one has one's doubts before plunging in, whether after
all, after the plunging and the dodging and the close shaves and
narrow squeaks, one does begin to feel that one is getting through,
whether after all one _will_ get through, and whether indeed there is
any getting through, whether, to deepen and enlarge and display one's
doubt quite openly, there is in truth any sort of ostensible and
recognizable other side attainable and definable at all, whether to
put this thing with a lucidity that verges on the brutal, whether our
amiable and in most respects our adorable Gosse isn't indeed preparing
here and now, not the gathering together of a conference but the
assembling, the _meet_, so to speak, of a wild-goose chase of an
entirely desperate and hopeless description."
At that moment Mr. George Moore was saying: "Little exquisite
shoulders without a touch of colour and with just that suggestion of
rare old ivory in an old shop window in some out-of-the-way corner of
Paris that only the most patent abstinence from baths and the
brutality of soaping----"
Each gentleman stopped simultaneously.
Ahead the path led between box-hedges to a wall, and above the wall
was a pine-tree, and the Editor of the _New Age_ was reascending the
pine-tree in a laborious and resolute manner, gripping with some
difficulty in his hand a large and very formidable lump of
unpleasantness....
With a common impulse the two gentlemen turned back towards the house.
Mr. James was the first to break the momentary silence. "And so, my
dear Moore, and so--to put it shortly--without any sort of positive
engagement or entanglement or pledge or pressure--I _came_. And at the
proper time and again with an entirely individual detachment and as
little implication as possible I shall _go_...."
Subsequently Mr. James was to have buttonholed Hallery's American, and
in the warm bath of his sympathy to have opened and bled slowly from
another vein of thought.
"I admit the abundance of--what shall I say?--_activities_ that our
friend is summoning, the tremendous wealth of matter, of material for
literature and art, that has accumulated during the last few decades.
No one could appreciate, could savour and watch and respond, more than
myself to the tremendous growing clangour of the mental process as the
last half-century has exhibited it. But when it comes to the
enterprise of gathering it together, and not simply just gathering it
together, but gathering it _all_ together, then surely one must at
some stage ask the question, _Why_ all? Why, in short, attempt to a
comprehensiveness that must be overwhelming when in fact the need is
for a selection that shall not merely represent but elucidate and
lead. Aren't we, after all, all of us after some such indicating
projection of a leading digit, after such an insistence on the
outstandingly essential in face of this abundance, this saturation,
this fluid chaos that perpetually increases? Here we are gathering
together to celebrate and summarize literature in some sort of
undefined and unprecedented fashion, and for the life of me I find it
impossible to determine what among my numerous associates and friends
and--to embrace still larger quantities of the stuff in hand--my
contemporaries is considered to be the literature in question. So
confused now are we between matter and treatment, between what is
stated and documented and what is prepared and presented, that for the
life of me I do not yet see whether we are supposed to be building an
ark or whether by immersion and the meekest of submersions and an
altogether complete submission of our distended and quite helpless
carcasses to its incalculable caprice we are supposed to be
celebrating and, in the whirling uncomfortable fashion of flotsam at
large, indicating and making visible the whole tremendous cosmic
inundation...."
[Illustration: _Mr. James converses with Mr. George Moore upon matters
of vital importance to both of them._]