Boon was greatly exercised over the problem of a president.
"Why have a president?" Dodd helped.
"There must be a Presidential Address," said Boon, "and these things
always do have a president."
"Lord Rosebery," suggested Wilkins.
"Lord Morley," said Dodd.
"Lord Bryce."
Then we looked at one another.
"For my own part," said Boon, "if we are going in for that sort of
thing, I favour Lord Reay.
"You see, Lord Reay has never done anything at all connected with
literature. Morley and Bryce and Rosebery have at any rate written
things--historical studies, addresses, things like that--but Reay has
never written anything, and he let Gollancz make him president of the
British Academy without a murmur. This seems to mark him out for this
further distinction. He is just the sort of man who would be made--and
who would let himself be made--president of a British affair of this
sort, and they would hoist him up and he would talk for two or three
hours without a blush. Just like that other confounded peer--what was
his name?--who bored and bored and bored at the Anatole France
dinner.... In the natural course of things it would be one of these
literary lords...."
"What would he say?" asked Dodd.
"Maunderings, of course. It will make the book rather dull. I doubt if
I can report him at length.... He will speak upon contemporary
letters, the lack of current achievement.... I doubt if a man like
Lord Reay ever reads at all. One wonders sometimes what these British
literary aristocrats do with all their time. Probably he left off
reading somewhere in the eighties. He won't have noted it, of course,
and he will be under the impression that nothing has been written for
the past thirty years."
"Good Lord!" said Wilkins.
"And he'll say that. Slowly. Steadily. Endlessly. Then he will thank
God for the English classics, ask where now is our Thackeray? where
now our Burns? our Charlotte Bronte? our Tennyson? say a good word for
our immortal bard, and sit down amidst the loud applause of thousands
of speechlessly furious British and American writers...."
"I don't see that this will help your book forward," said Dodd.
"No, but it's a proper way of beginning. Like Family Prayers."
"I suppose," said Wilkins, "if you told a man of that sort that there
were more and better poets writing in English beautifully in 1914 than
ever before he wouldn't believe it. I suppose if you said that Ford
Madox Hueffer, for example, had produced sweeter and deeper poetry
than Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he'd have a fit."
"He'd have nothing of the kind. You could no more get such an idea
into the head of one of these great vestiges of our Gladstonian days
than you could get it into the seat of a Windsor chair.... And people
don't have fits unless something has got into them.... No, he'd
reflect quite calmly that first of all he'd never heard of this
Hueffer, then that probably he was a very young man. And, anyhow, one
didn't meet him in important places.... And after inquiry he would
find out he was a journalist.... And then probably he'd cease to
cerebrate upon the question...."