Jewdwine leaned back, keenly alive to these stirrings of dissent; he withdrew, as it were, his protecting presence a foot or two farther. He spoke slowly and with emphasis. "Excess," said he; "too much of everything. Too much force, too much fire, and too much smoke with your fire. In other words, too much temperament, too much Rickman." "Too much Rickman?" "Yes; far too much. It's nothing but a flaming orgy of individuality." "And that's why it's all wrong?" He really wondered whether there might not be something in that view after all. "It seems so to me. Look here, my dear fellow. Because a poet happens to have been drunk once or twice in his life it's no reason why he should write a poem called _Intoxication_. That sort of exhibition, you know, is scandalous." Rickman hung his head. That one poem he would have given anything at the moment to recall. It _was_ scandalous if you came to think of it. Only in the joy of writing it he had not thought of it; that was all. "It's simply astounding in a splendid scholar like you, Rickman. It's such an awful waste." He looked at him as he spoke, and his soul was in his eyes. It gave him a curious likeness to his cousin, and in that moment Rickman worshipped him. "Go back. Go back to your Virgil and your Homer and your Sophocles, and learn a little more restraint. There's nothing like them. They'll take you out of this ugly, weary, modern world where you and I, Rickman, had no business to be born." "And yet," said Rickman, "there _are_ modern poets." "There are very few, and those not the greatest. By modern, I mean inspired by the modern spirit; and the modern spirit does not inspire great poetry. The greatest have been obliged to go back--back to primeval nature, back to the Middle Ages, back to Greece and Rome--but always back." "I can't go back," said Rickman. "I mayn't know what I'm working for yet, but I believe I'm on the right road. How can I go back?" "Why not? Milton went back to the Creation, and _he_ was only born in the seventeenth century. You have had the unspeakable misfortune to be born in the nineteenth. You must live on your imagination--the world has nothing for you." "I believe it _has_ something for me, if I could only find it." "Well, don't lose too much time in looking for it. Art's long and life's short, especially modern life; and that's the trouble."