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 God.  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 noble 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 passing 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.”