The Divine Fire Part 97

Fulcher," he said, "can no more return to Nature than he can enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born."

He walked up and down the little office excitedly, while he drew for Jewdwine's benefit an unattractive picture of the poet as babe, drinking from the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the bounteous mother. "You can't go for ever hanging on your mother's b.r.e.a.s.t.s; it isn't decent and it isn't manly. Return to Nature! It's only too easy to return, and stay.

You'll do no good at all if you've never been there; but if you mean to grow up you must break loose and get away. The great mother is inclined to bug some of her children rather too tight, I fancy; and by Heaven! it's pretty tough work for some of them wriggling out of her arms."

He came to a sudden standstill, and turned on Jewdwine the sudden leaping light of the blue eyes that seemed to see through Jewdwine and beyond him. No formula could ever frame and hold for him that vision of his calling which had come to him four years ago on Harcombe Hill.

He had conceived and sung of Nature, not as the indomitable parent by turns tyrannous and kind, but as the virgin mystery, the shy and tender bride that waits in golden abysmal secrecy for the embrace of spirit, herself athirst for the pa.s.sionate immortal hour. He foresaw the supreme and indestructible union. He saw one eternal nature and a thousand forms of art, differing according to the virile soul. And what he saw he endeavoured to describe to Jewdwine. "That means, mind you, that your poet is a grown-up man and not a s...o...b..ring infant."

"Exactly. And Nature will be the mother of his art, as _I_ said."

"As you didn't say--The mother _only_. There isn't any immaculate conception of truth. Don't you believe it for a moment."

Jewdwine retired into himself a moment to meditate on that telling word. He wondered what lay beyond it.

"And Art," continued Rickman, "is truth, just because it isn't Nature."

"If you mean," said Jewdwine, seeking a formula, "that modern art is essentially subjective, I agree with you."

"I mean that really virile and original art--the art, I believe of the future--must spring from the supreme surrender of Nature to the human soul."

"And do you honestly believe that the art of the future will be one bit more 'virile' than the art of the present day?"

"On the whole I do."

"Well, I don't. I see nothing that makes for it. No art can hold out for ever against commercialism. The nineteenth century has been commercial enough in all conscience, b.e.s.t.i.a.lly, brutally commercial; but its commercialism and brutality will be nothing to the commercialism and brutality of the twentieth. If these things are deadly to art now, they'll be ten times more deadly then. The mortality, among poets, my dear Rickman, will be something terrific."

"Not a bit of it. The next century, if I'm not mistaken, will see a pretty big flare up of a revolution; and the soul will come out on top. Robespierre and Martin Luther won't be in it, Jewdwine, with the poets of that school."

"I'm glad you feel able to take that view of it. I don't seem to see the poets of the twentieth century myself."

"I see them all right," said Rickman, simply. "They won't be the poets of Nature, like the nineteenth century chaps; they'll be the poets of human nature--dramatic poets, to a man. Of course, it'll take a revolution to produce that sort."

"A revolution? A cataclysm, you mean."

"No. If you come to think of it, it's only the natural way a healthy poet grows. Look at Shakespeare. I believe, you know, that most poets would grow into dramatic poets if they lived long enough. Only sometimes they don't live; and sometimes they don't grow. Lyric poets are cases of arrested development, that's all."

Jewdwine listened with considerable amus.e.m.e.nt as his subordinate propounded to him this novel view. He wondered what literary enormity Rickman might be contemplating now. That he had something at the back of his mind was pretty evident. Jewdwine meant to lie low till, from that obscure region, Rickman, as was his wont, should have brought out his monster for inspection.

He produced it the next instant, blushingly, tenderly, yet with no diminution of his sublime belief.

"You see--you'll think it sheer lunacy, but--I've a sort of idea that if I'm to go on at all, myself, it must be on those lines. Modern poetic drama--It's that or nothing, you know."

Jewdwine's face said very plainly that he had no doubt whatever of the alternative. It also expressed a curious and indefinable relief.

"Modern poetic drama? So that's your modest ambition, is it?"

Rickman owned that indeed it was.

"My dear fellow, modern poetic drama is a contradiction in all its terms. There are only three schools of poetry possible--the cla.s.sic, the romantic and the natural. Art only exists by one of three principles, normal beauty, spiritual spontaneity, and vital mystery or charm. And none of these three is to be found in modern life." These were the laws he had laid down in the _Prolegomena to aesthetics_, which Rickman, in the insolence of his genius, had defied. Somehow the life seemed to have departed from those stately propositions, but Jewdwine clung to them in a desperate effort to preserve his critical integrity. He was soothed by the sound of his own voice repeating them. He caught as it were an echo of the majestic harmonies that once floated through his lecture-room at Lazarus. "Besides," he went on, "where will you find your drama to begin with?"

"In modern men and women."

"But modern men and women are essentially undramatic, _and_ unpoetic."

"Still, I must take them, because, you see, there's nothing else to take. There never was or will be. The men and women of Shakespeare's time were modern to him, you know. If they seem poetic to us, that's because a poet made them so; and he made them so because he saw that--essentially--they _were_ so."

Jewdwine pushed out his lips in the manner of one unwillingly dubious.

"My dear Rickman, you have got to learn your limitations; or if not your limitations, the limitations made for you by the ridiculous and unlovely conditions of modern life."

"I have learnt them. After all, what am I to do? I _am_ modern--modern as my hat," said Rickman, turning it in his hands. "I admit that my hat isn't even a fugitive form of the eternal and absolute beauty. It is, I'm afraid, horribly like everybody else's hat. In moments of profound insight I feel that _I_ am horribly like everybody else. If it wasn't for that I should have no hope of achieving my modest ambition."

"I'm not saying anything against your modesty or your ambition. I'm not defying you to write a modern blank verse play; but I defy anybody to act one."

"I know," said Rickman, "it's sad of course, but to the frivolous mind of a critic there always will be something ridiculous in the notion of blank verse spouted on the stage by a person in a frock-coat and a top-hat. But do you think you'd see that frock-coat and top-hat if once the great tragic pa.s.sions got inside them?"

"Where _are_ the great tragic pa.s.sions?"

"They exist and are poetic."

"As survivals only. They are poetic but not modern. We have the pa.s.sions of the divorce-court and the Stock Exchange. They are modern, if you like, but not strikingly poetic."

"Well--even a stock-broker--if you insist on stockbrokers--"

"I don't. Take the people--take the women I know, the women you know.

Is there--honestly, is there any poetry in them?"

"There is--heaps. Oceans of poetry--There always has been and will be.

It's the poets, the great poets that don't turn up to time."

"Well; I don't care how great a poet you may be. Modern poetic drama is the path of perdition for you. I wish," he added with an unmistakable air of turning to a subject of real interest. "I wish I knew what to do with Fulcher."

"I don't know. I only know Mr. Fulcher's art hasn't much to do with nature. I'm afraid it's the illegitimate offspring of Mr. Fulcher and some young shepherdess of Covent Garden."

"He seems to have proved himself pretty much at home in Arcadia."

"Don't you believe him. He's only at home in Downing Street. You'd better leave him there."

But Jewdwine did not leave him there. He exalted Mr. Fulcher to the seventh heaven in four and a half columns of _Metropolis_. With his journalistic scent for the alluring and the vivid phrase, he took everything notable that Rickman had said and adapted it to Mr.

Fulcher. _In Arcadia_ supplying a really golden opportunity for a critical essay on "Truth to Nature," wherein Mr. Fulcher learnt, to his immense bewilderment, that there is no immaculate conception of that truth; but that to Mr. Fulcher, as poet, belonged the exultation of paternity. Jewdwine quoted Coleridge to the effect that Mr. Fulcher only received what he was pleased to give, and that in Mr. Fulcher's life alone did Nature live. And when Rankin, falling on that article, asked Maddox what it meant, Maddox replied that it meant nothing except that Mr. Fulcher was a Cabinet Minister.

But within three months of the day on which Jewdwine had p.r.o.nounced the modern poetic drama to be dead, Rickman had written the First Act of his tragedy which proved it (as far as a First Act can prove anything) to be very much alive.

Jewdwine received the announcement of this achievement with every appearance of pleasure. He was indeed genuinely relieved to think that Rickman was thus harmlessly employed. The incessant successful production of _Saturnalia_ would have been prejudicial to the interests of _The Museion_; a series of triumphant _Helens in Leuce_ would have turned Rickman aside for ever from the columns of _Metropolis_; but Jewdwine told himself that he had nothing to fear from the rivalries of the modern Tragic Muse. Rickman the journalist would live; for Rickman the poet had set out on the path of perdition.

n.o.body could say that it was Jewdwine who had encouraged him to take it.