Page:Hichens - The Green Carnation.djvu/189

Rh depth and dignity to the picture. No fruit is so worthless as the fruit with the bloom upon it."

"Yes," said Esmé. "The face must be young, but the soul must be old. The face must know nothing, the soul everything. Then fascination is born."

"Perhaps merely an evil fascination," said Lady Locke.

"Fascination is art. I recognise no good or evil in art," Esmé answered. "In England we have no art, just because we do recognise good and evil. Glasgow thinks it is shameful to be naked; yet even the Bible declares that the ideal condition is to be naked and unashamed; and Glasgow, being in Scotland, naturally gives the lead to England. We have no art. We have only the Royal Academy, which is remarkable merely for the badness of its cuisine, and the coiffure of its well-meaning President. Our artists, as they call themselves, are like Mr. Grant Allen: they say that all their failures are 'pot-boilers.' They love that word. It covers so many sins of commission. They set down their incompetence as an assumption, which makes it almost graceful, and stick up the struggle for life as a Moloch requiring the sacrifice of genius. And then people believe in the travesty. Mr. Grant Allen could have