es, and it will
not be the Odalisque which will gain by comparison.' It'll be there.
Every day I see the time grow nearer. In ten years the Olympia will be
in the Louvre."

"Never," shouted the American, using both hands now with a sudden
desperate attempt to get his hair once for all out of the way. "In ten
years that picture will be dead. It's only a fashion of the moment. No
picture can live that hasn't got something which that picture misses by a
million miles."

"And what is that?"

"Great art can't exist without a moral element."

"Oh God!" cried Lawson furiously. "I knew it was that. He wants morality."
He joined his hands and held them towards heaven in supplication. "Oh,
Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus, what did you do when you
discovered America?"

"Ruskin says..."

But before he could add another word, Clutton rapped with the handle of
his knife imperiously on the table.

"Gentlemen," he said in a stern voice, and his huge nose positively
wrinkled with passion, "a name has been mentioned which I never thought to
hear again in decent society. Freedom of speech is all very well, but we
must observe the limits of common propriety. You may talk of Bouguereau if
you will: there is a cheerful disgustingness in the sound which excites
laughter; but let us not sully our chaste lips with the names of J.
Ruskin, G. F. Watts, or E. B. Jones."

"Who was Ruskin anyway?" asked Flanagan.

"He was one of the Great Victorians. He was a master of English style."

"Ruskin's style--a thing of shreds and purple patches," said Lawson.
"Besides, damn the Great Victorians. Whenever I open a paper and see Death
of a Great Victorian, I thank Heaven there's one more of them gone. Their
only talent was longevity, and no artist should be allowed to live after
he's forty; by then a man has done his best work, all he does after that
is repetition. Don't you think it was the greatest luck in the world for
them that Keats, Shelley, Bonnington, and Byron died early? What a genius
we should think Swinburne if he had perished on the day the first series
of Poems and Ballads was published!"

The suggestion pleased, for no one at the table was more than twenty-four,
and they threw themselves upon it with gusto. They were unanimous for
once. They elaborated. Someone proposed a vast bonfire made out of the
works of the Forty Academicians into which the Great Victorians might be
hurled on their fortieth birthday. The idea wa