The evening newspapers were caught up, glanced at, and abused as worthless rags, and the editors covered with lively ridicule.

The conversation turned on Boulogne, where Mike had loved many solicitors’ wives, and then on the impurity of the society girl and the prurient purity of her creation—­the “English” novel.

“I believe that it is so,” said Harding; “and in her immorality we find the reason for all this bewildering outcry against the slightest license in literature.  Strange that in a manifestly impure age there should be a national tendency towards chaste literature.  I am not sure that a moral literature does not of necessity imply much laxity in practical morality.  We seek in art what we do not find in ourselves, and it would be true to nature to represent an unfortunate woman delighting in reading of such purity as her own life daily insulted and contradicted; and the novel is the rag in which this leper age coquets before the mirror of its hypocrisy, rehearsing the deception it would practise on future time.”

“You must consider the influence of impure literature upon young people,” said John.

“No, no; the influence of a book is nothing; it is life that influences and corrupts.  I sent my story of a drunken woman to Randall, and the next time I heard from him he wrote to say he had married his mistress, and he knew she was a drunkard.”

“It is easy to prove that bad books don’t do any harm; if they did, by the same rule good books would do good, and the world would have been converted long ago,” said Frank.

Harding thought how he might best appropriate the epigram, and when the influence of the liberty lately acquired by girls had been discussed—­the right to go out shopping in the morning, to sit out dances on dark stairs; in a word, the decadence and overthrow of the chaperon—­the conversation again turned on art.

“It is very difficult,” said Harding, “to be great as the old masters were great.  A man is great when every one is great.  In the great ages if you were not great you did not exist at all, but in these days everything conspires to support the weak.”

Out of deference to John, who had worn for some time a very solid look of disapproval, Mike ceased to discourse on half-hours passed on staircases, and in summer-houses when the gardener had gone to dinner, and he spoke about naturalistic novels and an exhibition of pastels.

“As time goes on, poetry, history, philosophy, will so multiply that the day will come when the learned will not even know the names of their predecessors.  There is nothing that will not increase out of all reckoning except the naturalistic novel.  A man may write twenty volumes of poetry, history, and philosophy, but a man will never be born who will write more than two, at the most three, naturalistic novels.  The naturalistic novel is the essence of a phase of life that the writer has lived in and assimilated.  If you take into consideration the difficulty of observing twice, of the time an experience takes to ripen in you, you will easily understand a priori that the man will never be born who will write three realistic novels.”