HERBERT SPENCER
been dipped in water to make it cling around the form. On my replying that it had, he seemed surprised, and laughed again. I then told him that it was a common custom for modern sculptors to do the same. "Then that was an imitation of the Greeks," he commented. I told him that I knew a man (referring to Alfred Gilbert) who rolled his clay out into thin blankets with a piecrust rolling-pin, and then put them around his nude figures, adapting the folds to the body and limbs, as wet cloths would fall into the hollows and cling to the rounded surfaces. All this was nuts for him to crack.
"If that statuette in marble, of Foley's," said Spencer, pointing to the mantel, where something covered with a silk pillow-case stood, "were found now in broken fragments in the Tiber, or in some ruins of ancient Greece, it would be upheld to the world as a miraculous gem." "Did Foley do much work in Rome?" I asked, not venturing upon an opinion as to the merit of his Art compared to that of the ancients.
Finally Spencer expressed surprise at the great reputation which Du Maurier had made for himself by his novels. I admitted that Trilby had had a great success, more particularly in America, where certain of the clergy had attacked it in the religious Press, which only advertised it the more. He then said that it was the habit with a certain set of faddists to assert that men were either all good or all bad, that no good man could do wrong innocently, and so on, which seems a contradiction to what we must perceive by an examination of our own personal desires, motives and actions, and so on. He wondered whether Trilby had been translated into French. I thought it would not suit the French taste, or be understood by the public, that it was
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