"But they've all done the contemporary! Only _their_ contemporary, not yours. The fallacy almost amounts to an Irish bull. The ancients _were_ the moderns--to themselves--just as we shall be the ancients to our successors. The Renaissance people all did contemporary work, under pretence of doing historical: contemporary types for Madonnas, local landscapes for Oriental scenery, up-to-date dresses for New Testament episodes, portraits of their patrons for patron-saints and apostles. Did you ever see a more modern figure than Tintoretto's portrait of himself, the elderly man in a frock-coat who looks on at his own wonderful picture of St. Mark descending to rescue a Christian slave? An Academician or a new English Art Clubbite who had done only one tiny corner of this picture would so swell as to the head that his laurel-wreath wouldn't fit him any longer. There's no ambition nowadays--Degas, Whistler, yes. But for the rest--dwarfs. Modern improvements indeed! Science may improve, but not art. Art, like religion, is an absolute in life--nobody will ever paint better than Velasquez, write better than Shakespeare, or pray better than the Psalmist. Science is the variable--always on the go; and when we think of progress it is just as well that we foolishly keep our eye on the machine-room." "Won't you have a drink?" I broke in, seizing the first opportunity. "Thanks! What's that book?" "'Olympia's Journal'! It's all about Olympia's husband, she married him to write about him--he was such 'good copy.'" I had unchained a torrent. "Novelists ought never to be introduced into novels," burst forth the Young Fogey. "The subject-matter of novelists is real normal life, and novelists are neither real nor normal. They are monsters whose function in life is to observe other people's lives. For one novelist to make copy of another is like cannibalism.