During one cruise his guests built up a highly-interesting gambling
scandal. He himself was confined to his cabin at the time, and
knew nothing about it; but the Opposition papers, getting hold of
the story, referred casually to the yacht as a "floating hell," and
The Police News awarded his portrait the place of honour as the
chief criminal of the week.
Later on he got into a cultured set, ruled by a thick-lipped
undergraduate. His favourite literature had hitherto been of the
Corelli and Tit-Bits order, but now he read Meredith and the yellow
book, and tried to understand them; and instead of the Gaiety, he
subscribed to the Independent Theatre, and fed "his soul," on Dutch
Shakespeares. What he liked in art was a pretty girl by a cottage-
door with an eligible young man in the background, or a child and a
dog doing something funny. They told him these things were wrong
and made him buy "Impressions" that stirred his liver to its
deepest depths every time he looked at them--green cows on red
hills by pink moonlight, or scarlet-haired corpses with three feet
of neck.
He said meekly that such seemed to him unnatural, but they answered
that nature had nothing to do with the question; that the artist
saw things like that, and that whatever an artist saw--no matter in
what condition he may have been when he saw it--that was art.
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