“Give me room!” he cried; “I mean to spread myself, to roll, to wallow, to wanton, to volupt!”

Before morning he had poured out his soul, in four columns of The Planet, the exuberant, irrepressible soul of the Celt.  He did it in an hour and twenty minutes.  As he said himself afterwards (relating his marvellous achievement) he was sustained by one continuous inspiration; his passionate pen paused neither for punctuation nor for thought.  The thoughts, he said, were there.  As the critical notices only appeared weekly, to pause would have entailed a delay of seven days, and he meant that his panegyric should appear the very next day after the article in the Literary Observer, as an answer to Hanson’s damnable paragraph.

If Maddox was urged to these excesses by his contempt for Jewdwine’s critical cowardice, Jewdwine was cooled by the spectacle of Maddox’s intemperance.  He had begun by feeling a little bitter towards Rickman on his own account.  He was disappointed in him.  Rickman had shown that he was indifferent to his opinion.  That being so, Jewdwine might have been forgiven if he had had no very keen desire to help him.  Still, he had desired to help him; but his desire had ceased after reading Maddox’s review.  There was no pleasure in helping him now, since he had allowed himself to be taken up and caressed so violently by other people.  The clumsy hand of Maddox had brushed the first bloom from his Rickman, that once delightful youth.  He was no longer Jewdwine’s Rickman, his disciple, his discovery.

But though Jewdwine felt bitter, he was careful that no tinge of this personal feeling should appear in his review of Rickman’s poems.  It was exceedingly difficult for him to review them at all.  He had to take an independent attitude, and most possible attitudes had been taken already.  He could not ignore Rickman’s deplorable connection with the Decadents; and yet he could not insist on it, for that was what Hanson and the rest had done.  Rickman had got to stay there; he could not step in and pluck him out like a brand from the burning; for Maddox had just accomplished that heroic feat.  He would say nothing that would lend countenance to the extravagance of Maddox.  There was really no room for fresh appreciation anywhere.  He could not give blame where Hanson had given it; and Maddox had plastered every line with praise.  He would have been the first to praise Rickman, provided that he was the first.  Not that Jewdwine ever committed himself.  As a critic his surest resource had always lain in understatement.  If the swan was a goose, Jewdwine had as good as said so.  If the goose proved a swan, Jewdwine had implied as much by his magnificent reserve.  But this time the middle course was imposed on him less by conviction than necessity.  He had to hold the balance true between Hanson and Maddox.

In his efforts to hold it true, he became more than ever academic and judicial.  So judicial, so impartial was he in his opinion, that he really seemed to have no opinion at all; to be merely summing up the evidence and leaving the verdict to the incorruptible jury.  Every sentence sounded as though it had been passed through a refrigerator.  Not a hint or a sign that he had ever recognized in Rickman the possibility of greatness.