Читать книгу Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences онлайн

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Bernard Shaw once told me that, meeting MrsBesant years after the Bradlaugh days, he said to her, half jokingly:

“You surely don’t believe one quarter of the rubbish you write and talk, do you?”

Her answer was to look at him coldly and turn on her heel. Which, after all, was perhaps the wisest answer she could give.

. . . . . . . .

A kindly old man took me to his studio and began to talk of Dickens. He spoke of those Victorian days as though they were the greatest that have ever been. He knew Anthony Trollope and all his works and looked askance at me because Barchester Towers was the only Trollope book I had read.

And then he took me to an easel and showed me his latest work—a “pretty-pretty” picture of a girl in a garden; the sort of picture that, according to my mood, either excites my laughter or throws me into a fury of rage.

But Marcus Stone was very old, and his ideals, being those of yesteryear, left me untouched. The young can never understand the old and, as I listened to him talking of art and literature and life, I told myself that we to-day are centuries away from the mid-Victorian days. If he had not been so old and kindly I should have wished to say: