“There is—­heaps.  Oceans of poetry—­There always has been and will be.  It’s the poets, the great poets that don’t turn up to time.”

“Well; I don’t care how great a poet you may be.  Modern poetic drama is the path of perdition for you.  I wish,” he added with an unmistakable air of turning to a subject of real interest.  “I wish I knew what to do with Fulcher.”

“I don’t know.  I only know Mr. Fulcher’s art hasn’t much to do with nature.  I’m afraid it’s the illegitimate offspring of Mr. Fulcher and some young shepherdess of Covent Garden.”

“He seems to have proved himself pretty much at home in Arcadia.”

“Don’t you believe him.  He’s only at home in Downing Street.  You’d better leave him there.”

But Jewdwine did not leave him there.  He exalted Mr. Fulcher to the seventh heaven in four and a half columns of Metropolis.  With his journalistic scent for the alluring and the vivid phrase, he took everything notable that Rickman had said and adapted it to Mr. Fulcher. In Arcadia supplying a really golden opportunity for a critical essay on “Truth to Nature,” wherein Mr. Fulcher learnt, to his immense bewilderment, that there is no immaculate conception of that truth; but that to Mr. Fulcher, as poet, belonged the exultation of paternity.  Jewdwine quoted Coleridge to the effect that Mr. Fulcher only received what he was pleased to give, and that in Mr. Fulcher’s life alone did Nature live.  And when Rankin, falling on that article, asked Maddox what it meant, Maddox replied that it meant nothing except that Mr. Fulcher was a Cabinet Minister.

But within three months of the day on which Jewdwine had pronounced the modern poetic drama to be dead, Rickman had written the First Act of his tragedy which proved it (as far as a First Act can prove anything) to be very much alive.

Jewdwine received the announcement of this achievement with every appearance of pleasure.  He was indeed genuinely relieved to think that Rickman was thus harmlessly employed.  The incessant successful production of Saturnalia would have been prejudicial to the interests of The Museion; a series of triumphant Helens in Leuce would have turned Rickman aside for ever from the columns of Metropolis; but Jewdwine told himself that he had nothing to fear from the rivalries of the modern Tragic Muse.  Rickman the journalist would live; for Rickman the poet had set out on the path of perdition.

Nobody could say that it was Jewdwine who had encouraged him to take it.

CHAPTER LXVI