to spend the day in bed, with the proofs of The Inevitable. . . .
A criticism of Plarr's Life of Dowson leads Teixeira, 27. 7. 20, to annotate the letter that contained it:
. . . I was suggesting, I wrote, that the effect . . . on the minds of a generation which knew not Dowson would be to make it feel that it did not want to know him. . . .
(Your cecession from catholicism, he replies, has done you McKennas a lot of harm. You flout tradition and go in for rational inference and deduction in its place. Horrible, horrible! The apostles are not all dead; many of them are your living contemporaries; you could, if you like, receive at first hand their memories of their dead fellows; and you prefer to make up your own mistaken impressions in the light of your own mistaken intellect. Well, well!
And, if you write just that sort of life of me, I'll wriggle with pleasure in my coffin.)
This evening Henry Arthur Jones is giving a dinner . . . to James M. Beck. . . . I have been bidden to attend. . . .
(Beck is the finest orator I ever heard; and I've heard Gladstone inter alios.
