"Your flies can't be too big, but they must be on small gut, not
on base viol fiddle strings, like those you brought down to Farnham last
year. I tell you gut is the thing that does it. Trout know that flies don't
go about with a ring and a hand pole through their noses, like so many
prize bulls of Lord Ducie's."
Then he got on the possible effect of association on the future of England,
and from that to the first International Exhibition, and the building which
was going up in Hyde Park.
"I mean to run a muck soon," he said, "against all this talk about genius
and high art, and the rest of it. It will be the ruin of us, as it has been
of Germany. They have been for fifty years finding out, and showing people
how to do everything in heaven and earth, and have done nothing. They are
dead even yet, and will be till they get out of the high art fit. We were
dead, and the French were dead till their revolution; but that brought us
to life. Why didn't the Germans come to life too? Because they set to work
with their arts, sciences, and how to do this, that, and the other thing,
and doing nothing.
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