“You are unaware of a struggle between your own mind and that of the artist?  I am glad.  It is the test of beauty and vitality that a beholder refuses to acquiesce at first glance.  There is a conflict to be undergone.  This thing thrusts itself upon us; it makes no concessions, does it?  And yet one cannot but admire!  You will seldom encounter that sensation among the masterpieces of the Renaissance.  They welcome you with open arms.  That is because we know what the creators were thinking about.  They are quite personal and familiar; they had as many moods, one suspects, as a fashionable prima donna.  They give pleasure.  This Faun gives pleasure and something more—­a sense of disquieting intimacy.  While intruding upon your reserve with his solemn, stark and almost hostile novelty, he makes at the same time a strange appeal—­he touches upon chords in our nature of which we ourselves were barely cognisant.  You must yield, Mr. Denis, to this stranger who seems to know so much about you.  When you have done so, you will make a surprising discovery.  You have gained a friend—­one of those who never change.”

“I am trying to,” replied Denis.  “But it is difficult.  We are not brought up that way, nowadays.”

“No.  Men have lost their frankness, their self-assurance.  Whoever yields, must be confident of his own strength.  Our contemporaries have lost that feeling.  They dare not be themselves.  They eke out lack of sincerity by profusion of commonplace.  Unlike the heroes of Homer, they repress their fears—­they repress everything, save their irrepressible flatulence of mind.  They are expansive in unimportant matters and at wrong moments—­blown about in a whirl of fatuous extremes.  The impersonal note has vanished.  Why has it gone, Mr. Denis?” he suddenly asked.  “And when did it go?”

The other was rather puzzled what to reply.

“I suppose you could trace its disappearance to the days of which you spoke, when artists began to display their moods to the world.  Perhaps further still.  Some Roman writers were fond of talking about their own affairs.  If they do, the public naturally becomes interested.  People like Byron must have had a good deal to do with it.  He was always harping on his private life.”

He paused, but the Count merely asked: 

“No further back than that?”

“I don’t know.  Christianity made us interested in other people’s feelings.  Brotherliness, you know.  That must have helped.  So did Socrates, by the way.  Of course it lowers the general standard.  Where everybody can read and write, there’s an end of good taste.  No, I don’t mean that exactly,” he added, feeling that he was expressing himself very stupidly.

“Well?”

“Oh, everything!  The telegraph and society papers and interviewing and America and yellow journalism . . . and all those family memoirs and diaries and autobiographies and Court scandals. . . .  They produce a new kind of public, a public which craves for personalities rather than information.  They want to learn about our clothes and incomes and habits.  Not a questioning public, I mean; a prying public—­”