The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

GLAZIERS’ HOUSES from the Overmen we want, and we will have; another we will not have. Rather than your mock-crucified castrato-devilry, Barabbas! But if it be your serious livelong purpose to slay all ideas by ridicule. . . . Then we must claim you as an adept, one fit for the scourge and the buffets, for the gibes and the slaver of the lick-spittle English, whose only notion of a jest is a smutty story. There is room for another hand at my bench. See! If thou be indeed Achilles, why should we be in doubt? The gilded arms of Pandarus—the speech of Ther- sites. Sir, these things trouble us! Thou seest it! If thou art journalist, the very journalists may rise from their slime, bubbling with foul breath, and suck thee down to their mother ooze unspeakable; but if not, then I too (no journalist, God knows!) must praise thee. Thee—not thy work. For the manner thereof is wholly abominable. What have all we done, that for Pegasus we have this spavined and hamstrung Rosinante, for Bucephalus this hydrocephalic hydropath? Even as god Gilbert begat the devil-brood musical comedy, so hast thou begotten the tedious stage-sermons to which our priest-loving, sin-conscious slaves now flock. Refinement of cruelty! Thou hast replaced the Trappist cell by the Court Theatre! For this, I, who prefer the study to the theatre, forgive thee; for I love not the badger-reek of Suburbia and Bohemia in my nostrils. But for this also I praise thee, that lion-like thou turnest at last upon the jackal-crowd at thy heels. That ungainly dragon, the Chesterbelloc, hast thou ridden against, 349