Number 87 Author:Eden Phillpotts Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI WHAT HAS DONE IT? It was the third evening after the introduction of Paul Strossmayer to our little circle, that poor Alexander Skeat had honore... more »d us with his company at dinner—and lectured us afterwards. For that is the only way to describe his minatory harangue. He treated us like a parcel of rather unsatisfactory children and, for my part, I doubted not that to his luminous and far-reaching mind the bulk of his fellow men appeared little removed from the immaturity of youth. Indeed we should have all conceded the point, if he had not been at such rather ill-bred pains to rub it in. As Bishop Blore said, "Most men know well enough that they are mediocre; but they resent being told so by superior and scornful strangers." I recollect that Mr. Skeat was troubled about the art of the country, and he cursed it in good set terms. Art was a subject whereon we were very willing to learn, and though General For- dyce, his brother and others paid no great attention, a dozen members—Jacobs and myself included—listened with interest and found the famous publicist convincing and suggestive. It was left for our latest comer, Mr. Strossmayer, to turn the monologue into a discussion when heasked civilly but pointedly, why Art, in the mind of the visitor, shut out all greater present demands and immediate needs. Skeat had just flouted Nature with hearty contempt. "If she can be personified in human terms, then only a lunatic would applaud her hideous manifestations," he said, "since she destroys with one hand what she creates with the other. To Art we must look for any rational interpretation of Nature, or human nature either." "But where are Art's rational interpretations?" asked Strossmayer. "Surely art is dead, or shall we say in a state of suspended animation? ...« less