"But now you fancy that you have formed a right idea of what is meant by three years?"
"Well, a better idea, at any rate."
"You are still a good way off it. But if you have formed a right estimate of a woman's friendship----"
"That's still something, you mean to say? But why did you stop short, Mr. Courtland?"
Phyllis was looking up to his face with a smile of inquiry.
"I was afraid that you might think I was on the way to preach a sermon on the text of woman's friendship. I pulled myself up just in time.
I'm glad that I didn't frighten you."
"Oh, no; you didn't frighten me, Mr. Courtland. I was only wondering how you would go on--whether you would treat the topic sentimentally or cynically."
"And what conclusion did you come to on the subject?"
"I know that you are a brave man--perhaps the bravest man alive. You would, I think, have treated the question seriously--feelingly."
He laughed.
"The adoption of that course implies courage certainly. All the men of sentimentality--which is something quite different from sentiment, mind you--have taken to writing melodrama and penny novelettes. You didn't hear much sentimentality on this stage to-night, or any other night, for that matter."
"No; it would have sounded unreal. A Parthenon audience would resent what they believed to be a false note in art; and a Parthenon audience is supposed to be the concentration of the spirit of the period in thought and art; isn't it?"
"I don't know. I'm half a savage. But I like to think the best of a Parthenon audience; you and I formed part of that concentration to-night--yes, I like to think the best of it. I suppose we know--we, the Parthenon audience, I mean--what our feelings are on the art of acting--the art of play-writing."
"I shouldn't like to have to define my feelings at a moment's notice."
"One must make a beginning, and then work up gradually to the definition."
"For instance----"
"Well, for instance, there's something that people call realism nowadays."
"My father has his ideas on what's called realism," Phyllis laughed.
" 'Realism in painting is the ideal with a smudge.' "
"I should like to hear what you think of it?"
He also laughed sympathetically.
"Oh, I only venture to think that realism is the opposite to reality."
"And, so far as I can gather, your definition is not wanting in breadth--no, nor in accuracy. Sentimentality is the opposite to sentiment."
"That is a point on which we agreed a moment ago. My father says that sentiment is a strong man's concealment of what he feels, while sentimentality is a weak man's expression of what he doesn't feel."
"And the Parthenon audience--you and I--laugh at the latter--that is, because we have practiced some form of athletics. The bicycle has given its /coup de grace/ to sentimentality. That man over there with the head and face like a lion's, and that woman whose face is nature illuminated, have long ago recognized the shallowness of sentimentality--the depths of sentiment. We could not imagine either of them striking a false note. They have been the teachers of this generation--the generation to which you belong. Great Heavens! to think that for so many years human passion should be banished from art, though every line of Shakspere is tremulous with passion! Why, the word was absolutely banished; it was regarded as impure."
"I know that--I was at a boarding school. The preceptresses regarded as impure everything that is human."
"Whereas, just the opposite is the case?"
"I didn't say that, Mr. Courtland."
"You could scarcely say it. I am only beginning to think it, and I have lived among savages for years. That man with the lion's face has not feared to deal with passion. All actors who have lived since Garrick have never gone further than to illustrate passion in the hands of a man; but that lion-man, whose stage we are now standing on, shows us not the passion in the hands of a man, but the man in the hands of the passion. The man who tears the passion to tatters is the robustious periwig-pated fellow; the actor, who shows us the man torn in tatters by the passion, is the supreme artist. I am no authority on modern literature; but I must confess that I was astonished at the change that a few years have brought about. I was in a proper position for noticing it, having been practically without books for two years."
"Is it a change for the better, do you think, Mr. Courtland?"
"I feel certain that it is for the better. I refer, of course, only to the books of those real investigators--real artists. I refer to the fountain-heads, not to the hydrants laid down by the water companies at the end of about ten miles of foul piping. I don't like the product of the hydrants. I like the springs, and, however natural they may be, I don't find anything impure in them. Why I love the Bible is because it is so very modern."
"You don't think, then, that it is yet obsolete, Mr. Courtland?"
"No book that deals so truly with men and women can ever be obsolete, the fact being that men and women are the same to-day as they were ten thousand years ago, perhaps ten million years ago, though I'm not quite so sure of that. The Bible, and Shakspere, and Rofudingding, a New Guinea poet, who ate men for his dinner when he had a chance, and, when he had finished, sang lyrics that stir the hearts of all his fellow-islanders to this day,--he lived a hundred years ago,--dealt with men and women; that is why all are as impressive to-day as they were when originally composed. Men and women like reading about men and women, and it is becoming understood, nowadays, that the truth about men and women can never be contemptible."
"Ah, but how do we know that it is the truth?"
"Therein the metaphysician must minister to himself. I cannot suggest to you any test of the truth, if you have none with you. Everyone capable of pronouncing a judgment on any matter must feel how truthfully the personages in the Bible have been drawn."
"Yes; the Bible is the Word of God."
