It was that famous essay in which he showed, once for all, with aggressive air as though the prophet of the gospel, that Realism was a Failure--that all Art must be symbolical. Though he still maintained that the expression of it must be of the hammered and perfect metal called Style, he had overstated the case for style--but he did not withdraw everything. He had said that Style was the All in All--that the matter did not matter. He renounced that position. Style was important, but it was the symbols that were significant in art.... Then this man, who baldly stated how he had thrust himself upon Zola, proceeded to tell how he had tricked Zola into giving him the advertisement of his praise, how he had lied to him, how he now despised him, because Zola, being grown rich, wrote in a room that was a bourgeois ideal of handsome furnishing. He employed all his sarcasm on making ridiculous what only the genial hospitality of the kindly Frenchman could have thrown open to his treacherous censure; and he ended with a scalding attack on the coarseness of Zola’s work and on the lack of its artistry. For himself--he had discovered a greater master, whose name was Ibsen. “In so far as my work has unwittingly been symbolical,” said he, with the majesty of a great renunciation, “in so far has it been good. For the rest, it has been written in vain....” To achieve the masterpiece, he was content to go to the Greeks--to Æschylus, to Euripides, to Aristophanes, to Sophocles in drama, to Homer in the Epic, to Phidias in art--the Greeks, he averred, recorded only the Inevitable Thing. As the great man sat down amidst a thunder of applause, Noll leaned over to a pimpled disciple: “Tell me,” said he--“what has this man done?” The youth gazed at him: “Oh, it isn’t that he has done anything yet,” he said. “That will come. He has the right attitude.” The pimply young man blew out cigarette smoke. Netherby Gomme rose to his feet: “I should like to ask our Master,” said he, without trace of smile on his cadaverous face, “and I ask it because I have only read Sophocles in the translation--to which of the plays of Sophocles did he allude when he burst into his splendid eulogy of the Greek genius just now--_OEdipus Tyrannus_, or _Ajax_ or _Hecuba_, or was he thinking of the _Prometheus Bound_?” Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre licked his puffy red lips uncomfortably, but said nothing. He smiled cynically to cover his hesitation--the fact was that he had never read a play by Sophocles, even in translation. There was a long tense pause. “Sophocles had the right attitude in _all_ his plays,” he said at last--“what is true of one is true of all.” Netherby sat down, and laughed loud and long: “Spoken like a game-cock!” cried he--“if a game-cock could sing----” Noll touched his sleeve confidentially: “But, Netherby,” said he--“Sophocles did not write _Prometheus Bound_. It was----” “Hush, Noll--the ass hasn’t the smallest idea of that----”