CHAPTER LXXVI
He wondered how it was that Lucia had seen what he could not see. As far as he understood his own attitude to Rickman, he had begun by being uncertain whether he saw or not; but he had quite honestly desired to see. Yet he had not seen; not because he was incapable of seeing but because there had come a time when he had no longer desired to see; and from not desiring to see he had gone on till he had ended by not seeing. Then because he had not seen he had persuaded himself that there was nothing to see. And now, in that last sudden flaming of Lucia's ardour, he saw what he had missed.
They parted amicably, with a promise on Lucia's part that she would stay with Edith in the summer.
By the time he returned to town he was very sure of what he saw. It had become a platitude to say that Keith Rickman was a great poet after the publication of The Triumph of Life. The interesting, the burning question was whether he were not, if anything, a greater dramatist. By the time Lucia came to Hampstead that point also had been settled, when the play had been actually running for three weeks. Its success was only sufficient to establish his position and no more. He himself required no more; but his friends still waited anxiously for what they regarded as the crucial test, the introduction of the new dramatist to a picked audience in Paris in the autumn.
Lucia had come up with Kitty Palliser to see the great play. She looked wretchedly ill. Withdrawn as far as possible into the darkness of the box, she sat through the tremendous Third Act apparently without a sign of interest or emotion. Kitty watched her anxiously from time to time. She wondered whether she were over-tired, or overwrought, or whether she had expected something different and were disappointed with Keith's tragedy. Kitty herself wept openly and unashamed. But to Lucia, who knew that tragedy by heart, it was as if she were a mere spectator of a life she herself had once lived passionately and profoundly. With every word and gesture of the actors she felt that there passed from her possession something of Keith Rickman's genius, something sacred, intangible, and infinitely dear; that the triumphant movement of the drama swept between him and her, remorselessly dividing them. She was realizing for the first time that henceforth he would belong to the world and not to her. And yet the reiterated applause sounded to her absurd and meaningless. Why were these people insisting on what she had known so well, had seen so long beforehand?
She was glad that Horace was not with her. But when he came out of his study to greet them on their return she turned aside into the room and called him to her. It was then that she triumphed.
"Well, Horace, he has worked his miracle."
"I always said he would."
"You doubted—once."
"Once, perhaps, Lucia. But now, like you, I believe."
"Like me? I never doubted. I believed without a miracle."
She leaned against the chimney-piece, and he saw that she was trembling. She turned to him a face white with trouble and anxiety.
"Where is he, Horace?"
"He's still with Maddox. You needn't worry, Lucy; if he scores a success like this in Paris that will mean magnificence." There was something unspeakably offensive to her in her cousin's tone. He did not perceive the disgust in her averted profile. He puzzled her. One moment he seemed to be worshipping humbly with her at the inner shrine, the next he forced her to suspect the sincerity of his conversion. She could see that now his spirit bowed basely before the possibility of the great poet's material success.
"You'll meet him if you stay till next week, Lucy. He'll be dining here on the tenth."
Again the tone, the manner hurt her. Horace could not conceal his pride in the intimacy he had once repudiated. He so obviously exulted in the thought that some of Rickman's celebrity, his immortality, perhaps, must through that intimacy light upon him. For her own part she felt that she could not face Keith Rickman and his celebrity. His immortality she had always faced; but his celebrity—no. It rose up before her, crushing the tender hope that still grew among her memories. She said to herself that she was as bad as Horace in attaching importance to it; she was so sure that Keith would attach none to it himself. Yet nothing should induce her to stay for that dinner on the tenth; if it were only that she shrank from the spectacle of Horace's abasement.
Something of this feeling was apparent in the manner of her refusal; and Jewdwine caught the note of disaffection. He was not sure whether he still loved his cousin, but he could not bear that his self-love should thus perish through her bad opinion. It was in something of his old imperial mood that he approached her the next morning with the proofs of his great article on "Keith Rickman and the Modern Drama." There the author of the Prolegomena to Æsthetics, the apostle of the Absolute, the opponent of Individualism, had made his recantation. He touched with melancholy irony on the rise and fall of schools; and declared, as Rickman had declared before him, that "in modern art what we have to reckon with is the Man Himself." That utterance, he flattered himself, was not unbecoming in the critic who could call himself Keith Rickman's friend. For Rickman had been his discovery in the beginning; only he had lost sight of him in between.
He was immensely solemn over it. "I think that is what I should have said."
"Yes, Horace; it is what you should have said long ago when he needed it; but not now."
He turned from her and shut himself up in his study with his article, his eulogy of Rickman. He had had pleasure in writing it, but the reading was intolerable pain. He knew that Lucia saw both it and him with the cold eye of the Absolute. There was no softening, no condonement in her gaze; and none in his bitter judgement of himself. Up till now there had been moments in which he persuaded himself that he was justified in his changes of attitude. If his conscience joined with his enemies in calling him a time-server, what did it mean but that in every situation he had served his time? He had grown opulent in experience, espousing all the fascinating forms of truth. And did not the illuminated, the supremely philosophic mood consist in just this openness, this receptivity, this infinite adaptability, in short? Why should he, any more than Rickman, be bound by the laws laid down in the Prolegomena to Æsthetics? The Prolegomena to Æsthetics was not a work that one could set aside with any levity; still, in constructing it he had been building a lighthouse for the spirit, not a prison.
But now he became the prey of a sharper, more agonizing insight, an insight that oscillated between insufferable forms of doubt. Was it possible that he, the author of the Prolegomena, had ceased to care about the Truth? Or was it that the philosophy of the Absolute had never taken any enormous hold on him? He had desired to be consistent as he was incorruptible. Did his consistency amount to this, that he, the incorruptible, had been from first to last the slave of whatever opinion was dominant in his world? Loyal only to whatever theory best served his own ungovernable egoism? In Oxford he had cut a very imposing figure by his philosophic attitude. In London he had found that the same attitude rendered him unusual, not to say ridiculous. Had the Absolute abandoned him, or had he abandoned the Absolute, when it no longer ministered to his personal prestige? Jewdwine was aware that, however it was, his case exemplified the inevitable collapse of a soul nourished mainly upon formulas. Yet behind that moral wreckage there remained the far-off source of spiritual illumination, the inner soul that judged him, as it judged all things, holding the pellucid immaterial view. Its vision had never been bound, even by the Prolegomena. If he had trusted it he might have been numbered among those incorruptible spirits that preserve the immortal purity of letters. As it was, that supreme intelligence was only a light by which he saw clearly his own damnation.