Now, it appeared, that simple
process was no longer adequate. People had tired of familiar "subjects";
it was the fashion to be interested in things that one hadn't always known
about--natural selection, animal magnetism, sociology and comparative
folk-lore; while, in literature, the demand had become equally difficult
to meet, since Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of studying the
"influence" of one author on another. She had tried lecturing on
influences, and had done very well as long as the public was satisfied
with the tracing of such obvious influences as that of Turner on Ruskin,
of Schiller on Goethe, of Shakespeare on English literature; but such
investigations had soon lost all charm for her too-sophisticated
audiences, who now demanded either that the influence or the influenced
should be quite unknown, or that there should be no perceptible connection
between the two. The zest of the performance lay in the measure of
ingenuity with which the lecturer established a relation between two
people who had probably never heard of each other, much less read each
other's works. A pretty Miss Williams with red hair had, for instance,
been lecturing with great success on the influence of the Rosicrucians
upon the poetry of Keats, while somebody else had given a "course" on the
influence of St. Thomas Aquinas upon Professor Huxley.
Mrs. Amyot, warmed by my participation in her distress, went on to say
that the growing demand for evolution was what most troubled her.
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