The Divine Fire Part 55

The disciple caught fire from the master's enthusiasm; he approved, aspired, exulted. His heart was big with belief in Jewdwine and his work. Being innocent himself of any sordid taint, he admired above all things what he called his friend's intellectual chast.i.ty. Jewdwine felt the truth of what Lucia had told him. He could count absolutely on Rickman's devotion. He arrived by well-constructed stages at the offer of the sub-editorship.

Rickman looked up with a curious uncomprehending stare. When he clearly understood the proposal that was being made to him, he flushed deeply and showed unmistakable signs of agitation.

"Do you think," said Jewdwine discreetly, "you'd care to try it for a time?"

"I don't know, I'm sure," said Rickman thoughtfully.

"Well, it's only an experiment. I'm not offering you anything permanent."

"Of course, that makes all the difference."

"It does; if it isn't good enough--"

"You don't understand me. That's what would make it all right."

"Make what all right?"

"My accepting--if you really only want a stop-gap."

"I see," said Jewdwine to himself, "the youth has tasted liberty, and he objects to being caught and caged."

"The question is," said Rickman, sinking into thought again, "whether you really want _me_."

"My dear fellow, why on earth should I say so if I didn't?"

"N--no. Only I thought, after the mess I've made of things, that none of your family would ever care to have anything to do with me again."

It was the nearest he had come to mentioning Lucia Harden, and the pain it cost him was visible on his face.

"My family," said Jewdwine with a stiff smile, "will _not_ have anything to do with you. It has nothing to do with _The Museion_.

"In that case, I don't see why I shouldn't try it, if I can be of any use to you." From the calmness of his manner you would have supposed that salaried appointments hung on every lamp-post, ready to drop into the mouths of impecunious young men of letters.

"Thanks. Then we'll consider that settled for the present."

Impossible to suppose that Rickman was not properly grateful. Still, instead of thanking Jewdwine, he had made Jewdwine thank him. And he had done it quite unconsciously, without any lapse from his habitual sincerity, or the least change in his becoming att.i.tude of modesty.

Jewdwine considered that what Maddox had qualified as Rickman's colossal cheek was simply his colossal ignorance; not to say his insanely perverted view of the value of salaried appointments.

"Oh," said he, "I shall want you as a contributor, too. I don't know how you'll work in with the rest, but we shall see. I won't have any but picked men. The review has always stood high; but I want it to stand higher. It isn't a commercial speculation. There's no question of making it pay. It must keep up its independence whether it can afford it or not. We've been almost living on Vaughan's advertis.e.m.e.nts. All the same, I mean to slaughter those new men he's got hold of."

Rickman admired this reckless policy. It did not occur to him at the moment that Jewdwine was reader to a rival publisher.

"What," he said, "all of them at once?"

"No--We shall work them off weekly, one at a time."

Rickman laughed. "One at a time? Then you allow them the merit of individuality?"

"It isn't a merit; it's a vice, _the_ vice of the age. It shrieks; it ramps. Individuality means slow disease in ethics and politics, but it's sudden death to art. When will you young men learn that art is self-restraint, not self-expansion?"

"Self expansion--it seems an innocent impulse."

"If it were an impulse--but it isn't. It's a pose. A cold, conscious, systematic pose. So deadly artificial; and so futile, if they did but know. After all, the individual is born, not made."

"I believe you!"

"Yes; but he isn't born nowadays. He belongs to the ages of inspired innocence and inspired energy. We are not inspired; we are not energetic; we are not innocent. We're deliberate and languid and corrupt. And we can't reproduce by our vile mechanical process what only exists by the grace of nature and of G.o.d. Look at the modern individual--for all their cant and rant, is there a more contemptible object on the face of this earth? Don't talk to me of individuality."

"It's given us one or two artists--"

"Artists? Yes, artists by the million; and no Art. To produce Art, the artist's individuality must conform to the Absolute."

Jewdwine in ninety-two was a man of enormous utterances and n.o.ble truths. With him all artistic achievements stood or fell according to the canons of the _Prolegomena to aesthetics_. Therefore in ninety-two his conversation was not what you would call diverting. Yet it made you giddy; his ideas kept on circulating round and round the same icy, invisible pole. Rickman, in describing the interview afterwards, said he thought he had caught a cold in the head talking to Jewdwine; his intellect seemed to be sitting in a thorough draught.

"And if the artist has a non-conforming devil in him? If he's the sort of genius who can't and won't conform? Strikes me the poor old Absolute's got to climb down."

"If he's a genius--he generally isn't--he'll know that he'll express himself best by conforming. He isn't lost by it, but enlarged. Look at Greek art. There," said Jewdwine, a rapt and visionary air pa.s.sing over his usually apathetic face, "the individual, the artist, is always subdued to the universal, the absolute beauty."

"And in modern art, I take it, the universal absolute beauty is subdued to the individual. That seems only fair. What you've got to reckon with is the man himself."

"Who wants the man himself? We want the thing itself--the reality, the pure object of art. Do any of your new men understand that?"

"We _want_ it--some of us."

"Do you _understand_ it?"

"Not I. Do you understand it yourself? Would you know it if you met it in the street?"

"It never is in the street."

"How do you know? You can't say where it is or what it is. You can't say anything about it at all. But while you're all trying to find out, the most unlikely person suddenly gets up and produces it. And _he_ can't tell you where he got it. Though, if you ask him, ten to one he'll tell you he's been sitting on it all the time."

"Well," said Jewdwine, "tell me when you've 'sat on' anything yourself."

"I will." He rose to go, being anxious to avoid the suspicion of having pushed that question to a personal issue. It was only in reply to more searching inquiries that he mentioned (on the doorstep) that a book of his was coming out in the autumn.

"What, _Helen_?"

"No. _Saturnalia_ and--a lot of things you haven't seen yet." It was a rapid nervous communication, made in the moment of withdrawing his hand from Jewdwine's.

"Who's your publisher?" called out Jewdwine.

Rickman laughed as the night received him. "Vaughan!" he shouted from the garden gate.

"Now, what on earth," said Jewdwine, "could have been his motive for not consulting me?" He had not got the clue to the hesitation and secrecy of the young man's behaviour. He did not know that there were three things which Rickman desired at any cost to keep pure--his genius, his friendship for Horace Jewdwine, and his love for Lucia Harden.