human
What are you at, you swine!
gpt
It's hardly necessary to announce your advent by kicking me, Mr. Iglesias, he said thickly, and without attempting to rise from his seat.
human
Not but that there is an appropriateness in that graceful form of introduction. Only a kick from the benevolent patron, who professed himself so charitably disposed towards me, was required to make up the sum of outrage which has been my portion to-day.--Have you seen the theatrical items in the evening papers? With trembling hands he spread out a newspaper upon his knees.
gpt
See the way that dirty reptile, Percy Gerrard, who succeeded me upon _The Daily Bulletin_, has chopped me and my play to mincemeat, cut bits of live flesh out of me and fried them in filth, and washed down my wounds with the vitriol of hypocritical compassion and good advice? That is the style of recognition a really first-class work of art, fit to rank with the classics, with Wycherley, and Congreve, and Sheridan, or Lytton--for there are qualities of all these very dissimilar masters in my writing--gets from the present-day press. As I have told you all along, the critics and playwrights hate me because they fear me. I have never spared them. I have exposed them and their ignorance, and want of scholarship, in print. They know I spoke the truth. Their hatred is witness to my veracity. They have been nursing their venom for years. Now with one consent they pour it forth. It is a vile plot and conspiracy. They were sworn to swamp me, so they formed a ring. They did not care what they spent so long as they succeeded in crushing me. Every one has been bought, miserably, scandalously bought. This is the only conceivable explanation of the reception my play has met with. They got at the members of my company. My actors played better at first, better at rehearsal. Yesterday and to-day they have played like a row of wooden ninepins, of straw-stuffed scarecrows, of rot-stricken idiots! They missed their cues, and forgot their lines, or pretended to do so; and then had the infernal impertinence to giggle and gag, blast them! I heard them. I could have screamed. I tried to stop them; and the stage-manager swore at me in the wings, and the scene-shifters laughed. It was a hideous nightmare. The audience laughed--the sound of it is in my ears now, and it tortures me, for it was not natural laughter. It was not spontaneous--how could it be so? It was simply part of this iniquitous conspiracy to ruin me. It was hired mockery, bought and paid for, the mockery of subsidised traitors, liars, imbeciles, the inhuman mockery of grinning apes!
human
For my play is a masterpiece, he wailed.
gpt
It is a work of genius. No other man living could have written it. Yet it is damned by a brainless public and vindictive press, while I know and they know--they must know, the fact is self-evident--that it is great, nothing less than great.