“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 there 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.”