Potterism | Page 6

its cure, took the party of investigation first to the Cornish coast. Partly because of bathing and boating, and partly because Gideon, the organiser of the party, wanted to find out if there was much Potterism in Cornwall, or if Celticism had withstood it. For Potterism, they had decided, was mainly an Anglo-Saxon disease. Worst of all in America, that great home of commerce, success, and the booming of the second-rate. Less discernible in the Latin countries, which they hoped later on to explore, and hardly existing in the Slavs. In Russia, said Gideon, who loathed Russians, because he was half a Jew, it practically did not exist. The Russians were without shame and without cant, saw things as they were, and proceeded to make them a good deal worse. That was barbarity, imbecility, and devilishness, but it was not Potterism, said Gideon grimly. Gideon's grandparents had been massacred in an Odessa pogrom; his father had been taken at the age of five to England by an aunt, become naturalised, taken the name of Sidney, married an Englishwoman, and achieved success and wealth as a banker. His son Arthur was one of the most brilliant men of his year at Oxford, regarded Russians, Jews, and British with cynical dislike, and had, on turning twenty-one, reverted to his family name in its English form, finding it a Potterish act on his father's part to have become Sidney. Few of his friends remembered to call him by his new name, and his parents ignored it, but to wear it gave him a grim satisfaction.
Such was Arthur Gideon, a lean-faced, black-eyed man, biting his nails like Fagin when he got excited.
The other man, besides Johnny Potter, was the Honourable Laurence Juke, a Radical of moderately aristocratic lineage, a clever writer and actor, who had just taken deacon's orders. Juke had a look at once languid and amused, a well-shaped, smooth brown head, blunt features, the introspective, wide-set eyes of the mystic, and the sweet, flexible voice of the actor (his mother had, in fact, been a well-known actress of the eighties).
The two women were Jane Potter and Katherine Varick. Katherine Varick had frosty blue eyes, a pale, square-jawed, slightly cynical face, a first in Natural Science, and a chemical research fellowship.
In those happy days it was easy to stay in places, even by the sea, and they stayed first at the fishing village of Mevagissey. Gideon was the only one who never forgot that they were to make observations and write a book. He came of a more hard-working race than the others did. Often the others merely fished, boated, bathed, and walked, and forgot the object of their tour. But Gideon, though he too did these things, did them, so to speak, notebook in hand. He was out to find and analyse Potterism, so much of it as lay hid in the rocky Cornish coves and the grave Cornish people. Katherine Varick was the only member of the party who knew that he was also seeking and finding it in the hidden souls of his fellow-seekers.
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They would meet in the evening with the various contributions to the subject which they had gathered during the day. The Urban District Council, said Johnny, wanted to pull down the village street and build an esplanade to attract visitors; all the villagers seemed pleased. That was Potterism, the welcoming of ugliness and prosperity; the antithesis of the artist's spirit, which loved beauty for what it was, and did not want to exploit it.
Their landlady, said Juke, on Sunday, had looked coldly on him when he went out with his fishing rod in the morning. This would not have been Potterism, but merely a respectable bigotry, had the lady had genuine conscientious scruples as to this use of Sunday morning by the clergy, but Juke had ascertained tactfully that she had no conscientious scruples about anything at all. So it was merely propriety and cant, in brief, Potterism. Later, he had landed at a village down the coast and been to church.
'That church,' he said, 'is the most unpleasant piece of Potterism I have seen for some time. Perpendicular, but restored fifty years ago, according to the taste of the period. Vile windows; painted deal pews; incredible braying of bad chants out of tune; a sermon from a pie-faced fellow about going to church. Why should they go to church? He didn't tell them; he just said if they didn't, some being he called God would be angry with them. What did he mean by God? I'm hanged if he'd ever thought it out. Some being, apparently, like a sublimated Potterite, who rejoices in bad singing, bad art, bad praying, and bad preaching, and sits aloft to deal out rewards to those who practise these and punishments