The Divine Fire
May Sinclair
CHAPTER XLII Page 2
"Yes. Helen's all right _now_." His tone implied only too plainly that she was not all right when Jewdwine had approved of her.
"_Now?_ What on earth have you been doing to her?"
"Only putting a little life into her limbs. But Vaughan wouldn't have her at any price."
"My dear Rickman, you should have come to _me_. I hope to goodness Vaughan won't tempt you into any more _Saturnalia_."
Jewdwine leaned back, keenly alive to these stirrings of dissent; he withdrew, as it were, his protecting presence a foot or two farther. He spoke slowly and with emphasis.
"Excess," said he; "too much of everything. Too much force, too much fire, and too much smoke with your fire. In other words, too much temperament, too much Rickman."
"Yes; far too much. It's nothing but a flaming orgy of individuality."
"And that's why it's all wrong?" He really wondered whetmight not be something in that view after all.
"It seems so to me. Look here, my dear fellow. Because a poet happens to have been drunk once or twice in his life it's no reason why he should write a poem called _Intoxication_. That sort of exhibition, you know, is scandalous."
Rickman hung his head. That one poem he would have given anything at the moment to recall. It _was_ scandalous if you came to think of it. Only in the joy of writing it he had not thought of it; that was all.
"It's simply astounding in a splendid scholar like you, Rickman. It's such an awful waste." He looked at him as he spoke, and his soul was in his eyes. It gave him a curious likeness to his cousin, and in that moment Rickman worshipped him. "Go back. Go back to your Virgil and your Homer and your Sophocles, and learn a little more restraint. There's nothing like them. They'll take you out of this ugly, weary, modern world where you and I, Rickman, had no business to be born."
"And yet," said Rickman, "there _are_ modern poets."
"There are very few, and those not the greatest. By modern, I mean inspired by the modern spirit; and the modern spirit does not inspire great poetry. The greatest have been obliged to go back--back to primeval nature, back to the Middle Ages, back to Greece and Rome--but always back."
"I can't go back," said Rickman. "I mayn't know what I'm working for yet, but I believe I'm on the right road. How can I go back?"
"Why not? Milton went back to the Creation, and _he_ was only born in the seventeenth century. You have had the unspeakable misfortune to be born in the nineteenth. You must live on your imagination--the world has nothing for you."
"I believe it _has_ something for me, if I could only find it."
"Well, don't lose too much time in looking for it. Art's long and life's short, especially modern life; and that's the trouble."
Rickman shook his head. "No; that's not the trouble. It's the other way about. Life's infinite and art's one. And at first, you know, it's the infinity that staggers you." He flung himself into a chair opposite Jewdwine, planted his elbows on the table, and propped his chin on his hands. He looked as if he saw the infinity he spoke of. "I can't describe to you," he said, "what it is merely to be alive out in the streets, on a sunny day, when the air's all fine watery gold, and goes dancing and singing into your head like dry champagne. I've given up alcohol. It isn't really necessary. I got as drunk as a lord the other day going over Hampstead Heath in a west wind" (he _looked_ drunk at the mere thought of it). "Does it ever affect _you_ in that way?"
Jewdwine smiled. The wind on Hampstead Heath had never affected him in that way.
"No. It isn't what you think. I used to go mad about women, just as I used to drink. I don't seem to care a rap about them now." But his eyes had a peculiar large and brilliant look, as if he saw the woman of his desire approaching him. His voice softened. "Don't you know when the world--all the divine maddening beauty of it--lies naked before your eyes, and you want to get hold of it--now--this minute, and instead it gets hold of you, and pulls you every way at once--don't you know? The thing's got a thousand faces, and two thousand arms, and ten thousand devils in it."
Jewdwine didn't know. How should he? He had a horror of this forcing of the sensuous and passionate note. The author of the _Prolegomena to Æsthetics_ recoiled from "too much temperament." He felt, moreover, the jealous pang of the master who realizes that he has lost his hold. This was not that Rickman who used to hang all flushed and fervid on Jewdwine's words. He remembered how once on an April day, a year ago, the disciple had turned at the call of woman and of the world, the call of the Spring in his heart and in his urgent blood.
"My dear Rickman, I don't understand. Are you talking about the world? Or the flesh? Or the devils?"
"All of them, if you like. And you can throw in the sun and the moon and the stars, too. There are moments, Jewdwine, when I understand God. At any rate I know how he felt the very day before creation. His world's all raw chaos to me, and I've got to make my world out of it."
"I'm afraid I cannot help you _there_."
As they parted he felt that perhaps he had failed to be sufficiently sympathetic. "I'll do my best," said he, "to set you right with the public."
Left alone, he stood staring earnestly at the chair Rickman had sat propping his chin in his hands. He seemed to be contemplating his phantom; the phantom that had begun to haunt him.
What had he let himself in for?