CHAPTER LXV
Often, after half a night spent in a vain striving to shape some immense idea into the form of beauty, be had turned the thing neck and crop out of his mind and gone to sleep on it. Whenever he did this he was sure to wake up and find it there waiting for him, full-formed and perfect as he had dreamed it and desired. It had happened so often that he had grown to trust this profounder inspiration of his sleep.
Hitherto it was only the problems of his heart that had been thus divinely dealt with; he had been left to struggle hopelessly with the problems of his life; and of these Flossie was the most insoluble. And now that he had given up thinking of her, had abandoned her to her own mysterious workings, it too had been solved and in the same simple, inevitable way. His contempt for Flossie's methods could not blind him to the beneficence of the result.
He wrote to her that night to the effect that he gladly and entirely acquiesced in her decision; but that he should have thought that he and not Mr. Spinks had been entitled to the first intimation of it. He had no doubt, however, that she had done the best and wisest thing. He forbore to add "for both of us." His chivalry still persisted in regarding Flossie as a deeply injured person. He had wronged her from the beginning. Had he not laid on her, first the burden of his passion, and yet again the double burden of his genius and his honour? A heavier load, that, and wholly unfitted for the poor little back that would have had to bear it. It never occurred to him that he had been in any way the victim of Flossie's powerful instincts. It was Maddox who said that Mr. Spinks had made himself immortal by his marriage; that he should be put on the Civil List for his services to literature.
Of Rickman's place in literature there could be no question for the next two or three years. He foresaw that the all-important thing was his place on The Planet, his place on Metropolis, his place (if he could find one) on any other paper. He had looked to journalism for the means to support a wife, and journalism alone could maintain him in his struggle with Pilkington. Whether Maddox was right or wrong in his opinion of the disastrous influence of Flossie, there could be no doubt that for the present Rickman's genius had no more formidable rival than his honour. If it is perdition to a great tragic dramatist when passion impels him to marry on three hundred a year, it can hardly be desirable that conscience should constrain him to raise seven hundred and fifty pounds in three years. Fate seemed bent in forcing him to live his tragedies rather than write them; but Rickman, free of Flossie, faced the desperate prospect with the old reckless spirit of his youth.
For the first year the prospect did not look so very desperate. He had found cheap rooms unfurnished in Torrington Square where the houses are smaller and less sumptuous than Mrs. Downey's. He had succeeded in letting the little house in Ealing, where the abominable furniture that had nearly cost so dear justified its existence by adding a small sum to his income. He had benefited indirectly by Rankin's greatness; for Rankin seldom contributed anything to The Planet now beyond his lively column once a week; and Rickman was frequently called on to fill his place. The Planet was good for at least a solid hundred a year; Metropolis (once it began to pay) for a solid two hundred and fifty or more; other papers for small and varying sums. When he totted it all up together he found that he was affluent. He could reckon on a round four hundred all told. In Torrington Square, by the practice of a little ingenious economy, he could easily live on a hundred and twenty-five; so that by the end of the first year he should have saved the considerable sum of two hundred and seventy-five pounds. At that rate, in three years—no, in two years and a—well, in rather more than two and a half years the thing would be done. By a little extra exertion he might be able to reduce it to two years; to one, perhaps, by a magnificent stroke of luck. Such luck, for instance, as a stage success, a run of a hundred nights for the tragedy whose First Act he was writing now.
That, of course, it would be madness to count on; but he had some hopes from the sudden and extraordinary transformation of The Museion.
Sudden enough, to the uninitiated, seeing that in September, ninety-seven, the organ of philosophic criticism to all appearances died, and that in October it burst into life again under a new cover and a new title, Jewdwine himself sounding the trump of resurrection. The Museion's old contributors knew it no more; or failed to recognise it in Metropolis. On the tinted cover there was no trace of the familiar symbolic head-piece, so suggestive of an Ionic frieze, but the new title in the broadest, boldest, blackest of type proclaimed its almost wanton repudiation of the old tradition.
Jewdwine's first "concession to modernity," was a long leading review of the "Art of Herbert Rankin." Herbert Rankin was so much amused with it that it kept him quiet for at least three weeks in his playground of The Planet. After such a handsome appreciation as that, he had to wait a decent interval before "going for Jewdwine." When he remarked to Rickman that it would have been more to the purpose if Jewdwine had devoted his six columns to the Art of S.K.R., Rickman blushed and turned his head away, as if Rankin had been guilty of some gross indelicacy. He was still virginally sensitive where Jewdwine was concerned.
But, in a sense not intended by Rankin, Jewdwine was very much occupied, not to say perturbed by the art of S.K.R. Not exactly to the exclusion of every other interest; for Rickman, looking in on the great editor one afternoon, found him almost enthusiastic over his "last discovery." A new poet, according to Jewdwine, had arisen in the person of an eminent Cabinet Minister, who in ninety-seven was beguiling the tedium of office with a very pretty playing on the pastoral pipe. Mr. Fulcher's In Arcadia lay on the editorial table, bound in white vellum, with the figure of the great God Pan symbolizing Mr. Fulcher, on the cover. Jewdwine's attitude to Mr. Fulcher was for Jewdwine humble, not to say reverent. He intimated to Rickman that in Fulcher he had found what he had wanted.
Jewdwine in the early days of Metropolis wore the hungry look of a man who, having swallowed all his formulas, finds himself unnourished. "The soul," Jewdwine used to say (perverting Emerson) "is appeased by a formula"; and it was clear that his soul would never be appeased until it had found a new one. Those who now conversed intimately with Jewdwine were entertained no longer with the Absolute, but they heard a great deal about the "Return to Nature." Mr. Fulcher's pipings, therefore, were entirely in harmony with Jewdwine's change of mood.
But Rickman, who had once protested so vigorously against the Absolute, would not hear of the Return to Nature, either. That cry was only a symptom of the inevitable sickness of the academic spirit, surfeited with its own philosophy. He shook his head mournfully over Mr. Fulcher. What looked to Jewdwine like simplicity seemed to him only a more intolerably sophisticated pose than any other.
"I prefer Mr. Fulcher in Downing Street to Mr. Fulcher in Arcadia. Mr. 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 breasts of the bounteous mother. "You can't go for ever hanging on your mother's breasts; 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 passionate 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 slobbering 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, bestially, 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 amusement 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 classic, 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 Æsthetics, 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 passions got inside them?"
"Where are the great tragic passions?"
"They exist and are poetic."
"As survivals only. They are poetic but not modern. We have the passions 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 pronounced 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.
Nobody could say that it was Jewdwine who had encouraged him to take it.