rcised rather a sobering effect upon us.
Once or twice he spoke out. Mention was made of Gissing's _Papers of
Henry Ryecroft_, and Father Payne asked him if he had read it. "Oh no, I
couldn't _read_ it, of course," said Gladwin; "I looked into it, and
had to put it away. I felt as if I had opened a letter addressed to someone
else by mistake!"

At a later period of the evening, a discussion arose about the laws of
taste. Father Payne had said that the one phenomenon in art he could not
understand was the almost inevitable reaction which seemed to take place in
the way in which the work of a great writer or painter or musician is
regarded a few years after his vogue declines. "I am not speaking," said
Father Payne, "of poor, commonplace, merely popular work, but of work which
was acclaimed as great by the best critics of the time, and which will
probably return to pre-eminence," He instanced, I remember, Mendelssohn and
Tennyson. "Of course," he said, "they both wrote a great deal--perhaps too
much--and some kind of sorting is necessary. I don't mind the _Idylls of
the King_, or the _Elijah_, being relegated to oblivion, because
they both show signs of having been done with one eye on the public. But
the progressive young man won't hear of Tennyson or Mendelssohn being
regarded as serious figures in art at all. Yet I honestly believe that
poems like 'Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal,' or 'Come down, O Maid,' have a
high and permanent beauty about them; or, again, the overture to the
_Midsummer Night's Dream_. I can't believe that it isn't a thing full
of loveliness and delight. I can't for the life of me see what happens to
cause such things to be forgotten. Tennyson and Mendelssohn seem to me to
have been penetrated with a sense of beauty, and to have been great
craftsmen too: and their work at its best not only satisfied the most
exacting and trained critics, but thrilled all the most beauty-loving
spirits of the time with ineffable content, as of a dream fulfilled beyond
the reach of hope. And yet all the light seems to die out of them as the
years go on. The new writers and musicians, the new critics, the new
audience, are all preoccupied with a different presentment of beauty. And
then, very slowly, the light seems to return to the old things--at least to
the best of them: but they have to suffer an eclipse, during which they are
nothing but symbols of all that is hackneyed and commonplace in music and
literature. I thin