Jewdwine

“ He remembered afterwards that Horace Jewdwine had the same trick. But in her, accompanied as it was by a pretty lifting of the corners of her mouth, it expressed friendly interest, in Jewdwine, apathy and a certain insolence. And yet all the time she was wondering how she should break it to him that their ways must now diverge.
"There's a horrible unconsciousness about it," he went on, pursuing as usual his own fancy. "If you could get bare nature without spirit, it would look like that." ”

“ But then, he had a voice of such singular musical felicity that it charmed you into forgetfulness of these enormities.
It had charmed Jewdwine from the first, and Jewdwine was hard to charm. There was no room for speculation as to him. Even to the eye his type had none of the uncertainty and complexity of Rickman's. He looked neither more nor less than he was—an Oxford don, developing into a London Journalist. You divined that the process would be slow. There was no unseemly haste about Jewdwine; time had not been spared in the moulding of his body and his soul. He bore the impress of the ages ”

“ In other words it meant that they acknowledged, and always would acknowledge, the genius while they judged it expedient to ignore the man.
But she had not always ignored him. Did it not rather mean, then, that Jewdwine would not trust her there; that, knowing her nature and how defenceless it lay before the impulses of its own kindness, he feared for her any personal communication with his friend? It did not occur to Rickman that what Jewdwine dreaded more than anything for Lucia was the influence of a unique and irresistible personal charm. ”

“ Genius was rarely to be seen, but Jewdwine felt that he would be the first to recognize it if he did see it; the first to penetrate its many curious disguises; the first to give it an introduction (if it wanted one) to his own superior world. And here was Rickman—manifestly in need of that introduction—a man who unquestionably had about him some of the marks by which a genius is identified; and yet he left you terribly uncertain. He was the very incarnation of uncertainty. Jewdwine was perfectly willing to help the man if only he were sure of the genius. ”

“ Maddox could not see what he saw, but his face reflected the horror of Jewdwine's.
Their voices were inaudible enough now.
"Do you know who it is?"
"I should think I did. It's the man himself."
"How truly damnable," said Rankin. After those words there was a silence which Jewdwine, like the wise man he was, utilized for his correspondence.
It was Maddox who recovered first. "Call him what you like," said he, in a wonderfully natural voice, between two puffs of a cigarette, "I consider him an uncommonly good sort. A bit of a bounder, but no end of a good sort." ”

“ In her heart Lucia admitted that it was so. There was a charm about this later Horace Jewdwine which was wanting in that high spirit that had essayed to move the earth. He had come down from his chilly altitudes to mix with men; he had shed the superstition of omnipotence, he was aware of his own weakness and humanized by it. The man was soiled but softened by his traffic with the world. There was moreover an indescribable pathos in the contrast presented by the remains of the old self, its loftiness, its lucidity, and the vulgarity with which he had wrapped it round. ”

“ You have it, my dear Rickets, in perfection, not to say excess; but most of us manage to lose it more or less as we go on. It's a deuced hard thing, I can tell you, for any editor to keep; and Jewdwine, I'm afraid, has latterly been induced to part with it to a considerable, a very considerable extent. It's a thousand pities; for Jewdwine had the makings in him of a really fine critic. He might have been a classic if he'd died soon enough."
"He is a classic—he's the only man whose opinion's really worth having at this moment."
"Whom are we talking about? Jewdwine? Or the editor of Metropolis?" ”

“ As he rose he spoke slowly and impressively. "What you've got to do is to pull yourself together. You can't afford to be dissolute, or even dissipated."
Rickman looked hard at Jewdwine's boots. Irreproachable boots, well made, well polished, unspotted by the world. And the only distinguishable word in Rickman's answer was "Life." And as he said "Life" he blushed like a girl when for the first time she says "Love," a blush of rapture and of shame, her young blood sensitive to the least hint of apathy in her audience.
Jewdwine's apathy was immense. ”

“ He saw one eternal nature and a thousand forms of art, differing according to the virile soul. And what he saw he endeavoured to describe to Jewdwine. "That means, mind you, that your poet is a grown-up man and not a slobbering infant."
"Exactly. And Nature will be the mother of his art, as I said."
"As you didn't say—The mother only. There isn't any immaculate conception of truth. Don't you believe it for a moment."
Jewdwine retired into himself a moment to meditate on that telling word. He wondered what lay beyond it.
"And Art," continued Rickman, "is truth, just because it isn't Nature." ”

“ Maddox, rightly judging that Rickman would be suffering more in his affection than his vanity, called on him that afternoon and dragged him out for his usual Saturday walk. As if the thought of Jewdwine dominated their movements, they found themselves on the way to Hampstead. Maddox attempted consolation.
"It really doesn't matter much what Jewdwine says. These fellows come up from Oxford with wet towels round their heads to keep the metaphysics in. Jewdwine's muddled himself with the Absolute Beauty till he doesn't know a beautiful thing if you stick it under his nose." ”

“ Jewdwine had neither respect nor longing for Miss Fulcher's passionate love. To his fragile temperament there was something infinitely more alluring in Lucia's virginal apathy. Her indifference (which he confused with her innocence) fascinated him; her reluctance was as a challenge to his languid blood. He was equally fascinated by her indifference to the income and position that were his. He admired that immaculate purity the more because he was not himself in these ways particularly pure. He loved money and position for their own sakes and hated himself for loving them. ”

“ Jewdwine's face expressed, as Rickman had anticipated, an exquisite disapproval. His own taste in women was refined almost to nullity. How a poet and a scholar, even if not strictly speaking a gentleman, could care to spend two minutes in the society of Poppy Grace, was incomprehensible to Jewdwine. ”

“ Horace Jewdwine was the most exacting, the most fastidious of men. His entire nature was dominated by the critical faculty in him; and Lucia satisfied its most difficult demands. Try as he would, there was really nothing in her which he could take exception to, barring her absurd adoration of his uncle Frederick ”

“ So it was all very well for Jewdwine, who was not so bewilderingly constructed, to talk about finding your formula and pulling yourself together. How, Mr. Rickman argued, could you hope to find the formula of a fellow who could only be expressed in fractions, and vulgar fractions, too? How on earth could you pull yourself together when Nature had deliberately cut you into little pieces? Never since poor Orpheus was torn to tatters by the Mænads was there a poet so horribly subdivided. ”

“ The Harden intellect had changed its sex. It was Horace Jewdwine who had found that out, counting it as the first of his many remarkable discoveries. Being (in spite of his conviction to the contrary) a Jewdwine rather than a Harden, he had felt a certain malignant but voluptuous satisfaction in drawing the attention of the Master of Lazarus to this curious lapse in the family tradition. Now in the opinion of the Master of Lazarus the feminine intellect was simply a contradiction in terms. ”

“ The great mother is inclined to bug some of her children rather too tight, I fancy; and by Heaven! it's pretty tough work for some of them wriggling out of her arms."
He came to a sudden standstill, and turned on Jewdwine the sudden leaping light of the blue eyes that seemed to see through Jewdwine and beyond him. No formula could ever frame and hold for him that vision of his calling which had come to him four years ago on Harcombe Hill. ”

“ One of these, having achieved a little celebrity, without (as he discovered to his immense astonishment) any public assistance from the Master, had gone to Rickman and asked him diffidently for the truth about Jewdwine. Rickman had assured him that the person in the study, the inspired and inspiring person with the superhuman insight, who knew your thoughts before you had time to round your sentence, the person who in that sacred incommunicable privacy had praised your work, he was the real Jewdwine. "But," he had added, "everybody can't afford to be himself." ”

“ And I assure you it means far more labour and a finer discrimination to pick out your little man from a crowd of little men than to recognize your great man when you see him."
"When you see him—"
"Ah yes—when I see him. But where is he? Show me," said Jewdwine, "one work of unmistakable genius published any time in the last five, the last ten years."
Rickman looked at him and said nothing. And to Jewdwine his silence was singularly uncomfortable. He would have been more uneasy still but for his conviction that the serenity in Rickman's eyes was reflected from the eyes of Fielding. ”

“ Jewdwine followed his fascinated gaze. He smiled faintly.
"You haven't noticed our new departure? We not only purchase Gentlemen's Libraries, but we sell the works of persons who may or may not be gentlemen."
Jewdwine felt profoundly uncomfortable. Rickman's face preserved its inimitable innocence, but he continued to stare fixedly before him.
"Poor fellow," thought Jewdwine, "he must have heard those imbecilities." He felt horribly responsible, responsible to the Club for the behaviour of Rickman and responsible to Rickman for the behaviour of the Club. What could he do to make it up to him? ”

“ From the very beginning he had never ceased to wonder at his unaccountable affection for Horace Jewdwine; the infatuation, for it amounted to infatuation, would have been comprehensible enough in any other man, but it was unaccountable in Rickman, who was wholly destitute of reverence for the sources of his income. Jewdwine of The Museion had been in Maddox's opinion a harmless philosophic crank; he had done nothing, absolutely nothing for Rickman's genius; but Jewdwine of Metropolis was dangerous, for he encouraged Rickman's talent ”

“ Honestly, Jewdwine, I'd rather write like Fulcher than write as you've made me appear to have written."
"My dear Rickman, that's where you make the mistake. You don't appear at all." He smiled with urbane tolerance of the error. "The editor, as you know, is solely responsible for unsigned reviews."
So far Jewdwine had come off well. He had always a tremendous advantage in his hereditary manners; however right you had been to start with, his imperturbable refinement put you grossly in the wrong. And at this point Rickman gave himself away. ”

“ So the intention may count against me, if you like."
"Look here, Rickman, that is not altogether what I mean. Neither of us is fit to marry Miss Harden—and I have given her up." He said it with the sublime assurance of Jewdwine, the moral man.
"Does it—does her illness—make all that difference? It makes none to me."
"Oh, well—all right—if you think you can make her happy."
"My dear Jewdwine, I don't think, I know." He smiled that smile that Jewdwine had seen once or twice before. "It may be arrogant to suppose that I'll succeed where better men might fail ”

“ Mr. Fulcher's In Arcadia lay on the editorial table, bound in white vellum, with the figure of the great God Pan symbolizing Mr. Fulcher, on the cover. Jewdwine's attitude to Mr. Fulcher was for Jewdwine humble, not to say reverent. He intimated to Rickman that in Fulcher he had found what he had wanted.
Jewdwine in the early days of Metropolis wore the hungry look of a man who, having swallowed all his formulas, finds himself unnourished. "The soul," Jewdwine used to say (perverting Emerson) "is appeased by a formula" ”

“ Still, instead of thanking Jewdwine, he had made Jewdwine thank him. And he had done it quite unconsciously, without any lapse from his habitual sincerity, or the least change in his becoming attitude of modesty. Jewdwine considered that what Maddox had qualified as Rickman's colossal cheek was simply his colossal ignorance; not to say his insanely perverted view of the value of salaried appointments.
"Oh," said he, "I shall want you as a contributor, too. I don't know how you'll work in with the rest, but we shall see. I won't have any but picked men. The review has always stood high ”

“ I believe, you know, that most poets would grow into dramatic poets if they lived long enough. Only sometimes they don't live; and sometimes they don't grow. Lyric poets are cases of arrested development, that's all."
Jewdwine listened with considerable amusement as his subordinate propounded to him this novel view. He wondered what literary enormity Rickman might be contemplating now. That he had something at the back of his mind was pretty evident. Jewdwine meant to lie low till, from that obscure region, Rickman, as was his wont, should have brought out his monster for inspection. ”

“ So many ideas, and you're the only man that can understand them." Jewdwine impressed everybody, himself included, as a person of prodigious understanding.
The question was, having understood Rickman, having discovered in him a neglected genius, having introduced him to the Club and asked him to dinner on the strength of it, how much further was he prepared to go? Why—provided he was sure of the genius, almost any length, short of introducing him to the ladies of his family. But was he sure? Savage Rickman was young, and youth is deceptive. Supposing he—Jewdwine—was deceived? ”