of his manner you would have supposed
that salaried appointments hung on every lamp-post, ready to drop into
the mouths of impecunious young men of letters.

"Thanks. Then we'll consider that settled for the present."

Impossible to suppose that Rickman was not properly grateful. 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; but I want it to
stand higher. It isn't a commercial speculation. There's no question
of making it pay. It must keep up its independence whether it can
afford it or not. We've been almost living on Vaughan's
advertisements. All the same, I mean to slaughter those new men he's
got hold of."

Rickman admired this reckless policy. It did not occur to him at the
moment that Jewdwine was reader to a rival publisher.

"What," he said, "all of them at once?"

"No--We shall work them off weekly, one at a time."

Rickman laughed. "One at a time? Then you allow them the merit of
individuality?"

"It isn't a merit; it's a vice, _the_ vice of the age. It shrieks; it
ramps. Individuality means slow disease in ethics and politics, but
it's sudden death to art. When will you young men learn that art is
self-restraint, not self-expansion?"

"Self expansion--it seems an innocent impulse."

"If it were an impulse--but it isn't. It's a pose. A cold, conscious,
systematic pose. So deadly artificial; and so futile, if they did but
know. After all, the individual is born, not made."

"I believe you!"

"Yes; but he isn't born nowadays. He belongs to the ages of inspired
innocence and inspired energy. We are not inspired; we are not
energetic; we are not innocent. We're deliberate and languid and
corrupt. And we can't reproduce by our vile mechanical process what
only exists by the grace of nature and of God. Look at the modern
individual--for all their cant and rant, is there a more contemptible
object on the face of this earth? Don't talk to me of individuality."

"