The revolution itself was not altogether sudden.  For many months the behaviour of The Museion had been a spectacle of great joy to the young men of its contemporary, The Planet.  The spirit of competition had latterly seized upon that most severely academic of reviews, and it was now making desperate efforts to be popular.  It was as if a middle-aged and absent-minded don, suddenly alive to the existence of athletic sports in his neighbourhood, should insist on entering himself for all the events, clothed, uniquely, if inappropriately, in cap and gown.  He would be a very moving figure in the eyes of hilarious and immortal youth.  And such a figure did The Museion in its latter days present.  But the proprietors were going to change all that. The Museion was about to be withdrawn from circulation and reissued in a new form under the new title of Metropolis.  As if aware of the shocking incongruity it was going to fling off its cap and gown.  Whatever its staying power might be, its spirit and its outward appearance should henceforth in no way differ from those of other competitors in the race for money and position.

While the details of the change were being planned in the offices of The Museion, the burning question for the proprietors was this:  would their editor, their great, their unique and lonely editor, be prepared to go with them?  Or would he (and with him his brilliant and enthusiastic staff) insist on standing by the principles that had been the glory of the paper and its ruin?  Mr. Jewdwine had shown himself fairly amenable so far, but would he be any use to them when it really came to the point?

To Jewdwine that point was the turning-point in his career.  He had had to put that burning question to himself.  Was he, after all, prepared to stand by his principles?  It was pretty certain that if he did, his principles would not stand by him.  Was there anything in them that would stand at all against the brutal pressure that was moulding literature at the present hour?  No organ of philosophic criticism could (at the present hour) exist, unless created and maintained by Jewdwine single-handed and at vast expense.  His position was becoming more unique and more lonely every day, quite intolerably lonely and unique.  For Jewdwine after all was human.  He longed for eminence, but not for such eminence as meant isolation.  Isolation is not powerful; and even more than for eminence he longed for power.  He longed for it with the passion of a weak will governed despotically by a strong intellect.  It amounted to a positive obsession, the tyranny of a cold and sane idea.  He knew perfectly well now what his position as editor of The Museion was worth.  Compared with that great, that noble but solitary person, even Maddox had more power.  But the editor of Metropolis, by a few trifling concessions to the spirit of modernity, would in a very short time carry all before him.  He must then either run with the race or drop out of it altogether; and between these two courses, Jewdwine, with all his genius for hesitation, could not waver.  After much deliberation he had consented (not without some show of condescension) to give his name and leadership to Metropolis; and he reaped the reward of his plasticity in a substantial addition to his income.