Potterism | Page 6

was
advocated by the Potter press.
Johnny cracked nuts in silence. He thought the Church insincere, a
put-up job, but that dissenters were worse. They should all be abolished,
with other shams. For a short time at Oxford he had given the Church a
trial, even felt real admiration for it, under the influence of his friend
Juke, and after hearing sermons from Father Waggett, Dr. Dearmer,
and Canon Adderley. But he had soon given it up, seen it wouldn't do;
the above-mentioned priests were not representative; the Church as a
whole canted, was hypocritical and Potterish, and must go.

CHAPTER II
ANTI-POTTERS
1
The quest of Potterism, its causes and 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.
2
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