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They're up against what we agreed to call Potterism the Potterism, that is, of second-rate sentimentalism and cheap short-cuts and mediocrity; they stand for brain and clear thinking against muddle and cant; but they're fighting it with Potterite weapons self-interest, following things for what they bring them rather than for the things in themselves.
They're the progressives of the world. They they have their reward. 'We seem to have decided, Katherine said, 'that Jane is a Potterite. 'Morally she is. Not intellectually. You can be a Potterite in many ways. Jane accepts the second-rate, though she recognises it as such.... The plain fact is, I was in a fit of savage truth-speaking, 'that Jane is second-rate. 'Well ...
I faced him, black and bitter, and he was not only to me Jane's husband, the suspicious, narrow-minded ass to whom she was tied, but, much more, the Potterite, the user of cant phrases, the ignorant player to the gallery of the Pinkerton press, the fool who had so little sense of his folly that he disputed on facts with the experts who wrote for the Weekly Fact.
I go with mother to the Writers' sometimes, though; that's not bad fun. Mother often speaks there, you know, and I go and hear. Jolly good she is, too. She read a ripping paper last week on the "Modern Heroine." Jane's considering eyes weighed Hobart, whose courtesy was still impregnable. How far was he the complete Potterite, identified with his absurd press? Did he even appreciate Leila Yorke?
He didn't tell them; he just said if they didn't, some being he called God would be angry with them. What did he mean by God? I'm hanged if he'd ever thought it out. Some being, apparently, like a sublimated Potterite, who rejoices in bad singing, bad art, bad praying, and bad preaching, and sits aloft to deal out rewards to those who practise these and punishments to those who don't.
No good scientist could conceivably be a Potterite, because he's concerned with truth, and the kind of truth, too, that it's difficult to arrive at. Potterism is all for short and easy cuts and showy results. Science has to work its way step by step, and then hasn't much to show for it. It isn't greedy.
The Pinkerton papers and the others can supply the ideas; we are out for facts. Anyhow, Hobart I knew for an ignorant person. All he had was a flair for the popular point of view. That was why Pinkerton who knew men, got hold of him. He was a true Potterite. Possibly I always saw him at his least eloquent and his most cautious, because he didn't like me and knew I didn't like him.
What is the truth? Where, between these two poles, does the actual church stand? Or does it, like most of us its members, swing to and from between them, touching now one, now the other? A Potterite church yes; because we are most of us Potterites.
He's been awfully rude to father's papers always. And that horrid article he had in his silly paper about what he called 'Potterite Fiction, mostly about mother's books did you read it? 'Yes. But Gideon didn't write it, you know. It was some one else. 'Oh, well, it was in his paper, anyhow. And he thought it.... And, anyhow, what are books, to hurt people's feelings about?
Well, what about an article, then we'd get Neilson to do one on the whole tribe of fiction-writing fools, taking Lady Pinkerton for a peg to hang it on? ... After all, we are the organ of the Anti-Potter League. We ought to hammer at Potterite fiction as well as at Potterite journalism and politics. For two pins I'd get Johnny Potter to do it. He would, I believe. 'I'm sure he would.
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