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None of them offering cash, as far as I can see only fame pure and undefiled! Hullo! that's a compliment! the Parnassians have put me on their Council. And last year, I was told, I couldn't even get in as an ordinary member. Dash their impudence!... This is really astounding! What are yours, darling?"
"Of the Parnassians," rumbled on Professor von Dresslin, "here in the Alps we possess one notable example namely, the Parnassus Apollo. It is for the capture of this never-to-be-sufficiently studied butterfly that I have, upon this ibex-hunting expedition, myself equipped with net and suitable paraphernalia." "I see," nodded Brown, eyeing the green tin box and the net.
Poor devil, it's in his blood I suppose. Takes the air, now, quite independent of me, but I fancy he gets uneasy if I delay, for he comes and circles over the hangar until my machine takes the air. And if it doesn't he comes down to find out why, mad and yelping at me like an irritated goblin. I saw an Alpine butterfly to-day one of those Parnassians all white with wings veined a greenish black.
In his time there were ten other writers, none of whom equalled him, Parnassians in poetry, positivists in criticism, realists in romance or in dramatic writing, who laboured at the same work. His æstheticism is not his alone, yet Madame Bovary and Salammbô shot like unexpected meteors out of a grey sky, the dull, low sky of the Second Empire.
Each letter offered to name some coming child after these Parnassians. Near by lay a pile of old magazines from which the industrious Mr. Phillips evidently culled the names of his literary favorites. Urwick smiled grimly and tiptoed from the room. On the stairs he met a fat charwoman. He asked her if Mr. Phillips were married. "Whisky is his wife and child," she replied.
The Parnassians, allied to the Papilionidæ, all live only in high altitudes, and are, by the thinly scaled and always-to-be-remembered red and plack ge-spotted wings, to be readily recognized. I haf already two specimens captured this morning. I haff the honour, sir, to exhibit them for your inspection "
He seems less an interpreter of the earth than one who sought after a fantastic world which had been created by Swinburne and the Parnassians and the old painters and the tellers of the Arabian Nights. "He began," Mr. J.C. Squire has said, "by being more interested in his art than in himself." And all but a score or so of his poems suggest that this was his way to the last.
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