It's given us one or two artists--"

"Artists? Yes, artists by the million; and no Art. To produce Art, the
artist's individuality must conform to the Absolute."

Jewdwine in ninety-two was a man of enormous utterances and noble
truths. With him all artistic achievements stood or fell according to
the canons of the _Prolegomena to AEsthetics_. Therefore in ninety-two
his conversation was not what you would call diverting. Yet it made
you giddy; his ideas kept on circulating round and round the same icy,
invisible pole. Rickman, in describing the interview afterwards, said
he thought he had caught a cold in the head talking to Jewdwine; his
intellect seemed to be sitting in a thorough draught.

"And if the artist has a non-conforming devil in him? If he's the sort
of genius who can't and won't conform? Strikes me the poor old
Absolute's got to climb down."

"If he's a genius--he generally isn't--he'll know that he'll express
himself best by conforming. He isn't lost by it, but enlarged. Look at
Greek art. There," said Jewdwine, a rapt and visionary air passing
over his usually apathetic face, "the individual, the artist, is
always subdued to the universal, the absolute beauty."

"And in modern art, I take it, the universal absolute beauty is
subdued to the individual. That seems only fair. What you've got to
reckon with is the man himself."

"Who wants the man himself? We want the thing itself--the reality, the
pure object of art. Do any of your new men understand that?"

"We _want_ it--some of us."

"Do you _understand_ it?"

"Not I. Do you understand it yourself? Would you know it if you met it
in the street?"

"It never is in the street."

"How do you know? You can't say where it is or what it is. You can't
say anything about it at all. But while you're all trying to find out,
the most unlikely person suddenly gets up and produces it. And _he_
can't tell you where he got it. Though, if you ask him, ten to one
he'll tell you he's been sitting on it all the time."

"Well," said Jewdwine, "tell me when you've 'sat on' anything
yourself."

"I will." He rose to go, being anxious to avoid the suspicion of
having pushed that question to a personal issue. It was only in reply
to more searching inquiries that he mentioned (on the doorstep) that a
book of his was coming out in the autumn.

"What, _Helen_?"

"No. _Saturnalia_ and--a lot of things you haven't seen yet." It was a
rapid nervous communication, ma