The Galaxy, June 1877: Vol. XXIII.—June, 1877.—No. 6.Various
General
The Galaxy, June 1877: Vol. XXIII.—June, 1877.—No. 6.
Various
American literature -- Periodicals
enemy but the ignorant. These artists, however, were the enemies of all
art but their own.
At the present these genial brothers regularly met of nights in the
lodgings of one of them, who happened to have a large studio in the
west central region of London, where so much of this unfashionable
story happens to be cast. Victor Heron had many times been told of the
genius that burned by night in that favored haunt, and had expressed a
modest wish to be allowed to pass for an hour within its light. Mr.
Blanchet was glad of the opportunity of introducing such a friend; for
it somehow seemed as if the consideration of any member of the
fraternity was enhanced among his brothers not a little by the fact
that he could introduce into their midst some distinguished personage
from the despised outer world. With them Victor Heron might very well
pass for a distinguished public man, as in fact he already did, with no
design of his own that way, in the eyes of Herbert Blanchet. To Victor
the school was all composed of gifted and rising men, whom it was a
pride to know or even to meet. To the school, on the other hand, Victor
was a remarkable public man, a tremendous "swell," who had done some
wondrous things in some far-off countries, and who, for all they knew
at the time, might be regarded by the world as the prospective Prime
Minister of England.
There was a peculiar principle of reciprocity tacitly recognized among
these brothers in art. No one of them would admit that there was
anything which his brother knew and he did not know. If one of them
read an author for the first time, and came to meet his fellows proud
of his freshly-acquired knowledge, he found no man among them who would
admit that he had not from his birth upward been equally familiar with
the author in question. It would be easy, surely, some one may say, to
expose such pretension. Just so; of course it would. But when one
brother had shown tonight that his friends had never read Schopenhauer,
and in point of fact could not read him if they tried, who should
guarantee that same brother against a similar exposure of his own
harmless little false pretences to-morrow when he professed to know all
about Euripides? It was not found convenient in this little circle to
examine too closely into the pretensions of each other. Live and let
live was the motto of the school so far as their esoteric professors
were concerned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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