Read Online After My Fashion by John Cowper Powys - Free Book Online

suppose you get quite a lot of royalties from those books of yours? I seem to remember having seen them on bookstalls in town. They’re all about absinthe drinkers and cognac fiends, aren’t they – with illustrations of night life in the boulevards – the sort of thing Oscar Wilde used to tell us to read?’
    â€˜They’re about the literature of France,’ answered Richard, keeping his temper with difficulty, ‘and my Life of Verlaine is certainly illustrated; but not all my authors have the weaknesses you speak of. Two very interesting ones are priests.’
    â€˜They may be nuns, for all I should know,’ threw out Mr Canyot. ‘I daresay nuns, in France, compose literature like the rest. What puzzles me is how a sensible Englishman like yourself can waste time over such affected frippery. Come now – between ourselves – when it isn’t a matter of selling , don’t you think all this modern stuff – vers litre and so forth – is just tommy-rot?’
    Richard was certain that he caught a direct appeal from Nelly that he should behave well under this attack. On the strength of an understanding with her he felt ready to be quite magnanimous. ‘I’m not prepared to defend anything en masse ,’ he said calmly. ‘But I think we’re bound to take a critical interest in every new experiment.’

    â€˜Rats!’ responded the other, his great corrugated youthful countenance getting red with anger as he caught a sympathetic look pass between Richard and Nelly. ‘Rats! you know perfectly well that any genuine production is the result of three factors – skill, insight and inspiration. These people just flop and wallow around, and call their damned impertinence “genius”. We’re not by any means bound to take a critical interest in things which we know, by the smell, before we touch them, are thoroughly worthless!’
    Nelly burst out laughing at this. ‘Mr Storm doesn’t judge literature by the smell,’ she said. ‘Everyone hasn’t got such terrible second-sight as you have, Robert. Most of us have to read a thing before we know what it’s like.’
    But Mr Canyot could not be stopped. The consciousness that he was making a fool of himself drove him on.
    â€˜Experiments! You talk of experiments. What we want nowadays is knowledge and serious hard work.
    â€˜It’s just the same with everything. I have no doubt Mr Storm is a Sinn Feiner and a pro-Bolshevik, and believes in Egypt for the Egyptians and India for the Indians. Some people are interested in nothing else but experiments; and they’ll go on experimenting till everything bursts up. I tell you, what we want in these times is carefully tested first-hand knowledge – not pretty theories; and hard steady work, not ramping around being “original”!’
    Nelly’s social anxiety to keep the peace was rapidly breaking down now under an extreme schoolgirl longing to burst into an uncontrollable fit of giggling.
    The forced smile assumed by Richard and his weary air of abysmal superiority struck her fancy as quite as comic as the excited rudeness of Canyot. She thought within herself, these poor dears! – how they do go on! And it suddenly struck her how complicated life is made for women by the mania men have for asserting their intellectual prejudices and losing all interest in the actual details before them. She herself was the ‘actual detail’ before them now, and here they were, glutting their respective mental vanities on what she knew was a perfectly irrelevant discussion, betraying that as a matter of fact they were really more interested in one another’s pompous ‘attitudes’ than in any possible opinion she might profess.
    She had once seen, in Arundel Park, two homed stags fightingover a deer. Those animals also seemed to forget the cause of their conflict in the sheer joy of