A Man of Genius by Janet Todd Read Free Book Online

sweat, tobacco and talk in the Castle and Falcon or the Swan Tavern or The Queen’s Arms in Bird-in-hand Court in Cheapside. Other women occasionally hung on sleeves but they were never part of the inner circle and Ann didn’t see them as separate beings. Of the men she should have liked Richard Perry most, for he was more gentle to women than the others and he adored Robert, but there was something disturbing there, some core best not deranged – she heard he’d lost a young wife, perhaps that had marked him. No, if she had to do with anyone beyond Robert James, it would be with big Irish Fred Curran. Once she fancied Gilbert might have looked like him. He gave his flesh to Gilbert and Gilbert responded with his eclectic words.
    Robert had so much promise – far beyond what he’d already done as a young man. Everyone said so. He had fire in his brain, he would make a difference in the world. They were lesser beside him. He draped his personality over the company like a bright bespangled cloak.
    He didn’t care for politics, he’d said so often. That was not it; he cared so deeply the quotidian was neither here nor there. His ‘politics’ were capacious. Anarchists and radicals were old-fashioned. They wanted simple things: money, fairness, equality. They had had no vision, no Vision. They were Protestants, secular Protestants,Separated people. They lacked the grandeur of the universal, of transcendent thought. It took a lapsed Catholic to see that. Urbi et orbi , after all.
    Back in that quotidian world Richard Perry and Frederick Curran both suspected Robert was being watched. Fred Curran said he knew he’d been followed – and Robert was a bigger fish. Activities on the Continent? Were they not both Irishmen, obnoxious to English authority, any authority?
    Robert James denied it, but he was suspicious in strange ways none the less. Sometimes he sensed men lurking in corners of taverns or in dark hallways.
    Ann registered Fred Curran’s words. She asked Robert how he’d got into trouble with ‘authorities’ and where it happened. He looked at her for some moments, then away, and let out a deep breath.
    â€˜Who said that?’
    â€˜Richard Perry.’
    â€˜Richard Perry knows nothing.’
    Politics didn’t matter. Only poetry of philosophy, philosophy of poetry – purity of language which is its beauty. He’d tried to say something of this in Attila , showing brute power grappling with words, but he’d failed. He knew that. The form was wrong.
    â€˜See, see,’ he said, holding her hand and letting his thoughts ripple through his body and into hers. ‘Do you see? The metaphysics of beauty develops the concept of the beautiful in its pure form. It’s abstracted from particulars, through the unity of the elements which appear – always appear – where the Beautiful truly exists. Of course, of course, they’re so intrinsically contained in the ideal unity of the idea that each demands the others. Only words contain them. See?’
    She had no impulse to say Not quite – certainly not while his burning hand held hers.
    â€˜This is an abstraction insofar as it can only be realised by unaccommodating Truth. A pure concept as such can have no objective existence. But – and this is important – it’s not to be seen as a mere form created by thought; it’s the foundation and content of its truth.This principle is always right. It must be.’ His eyes shone. ‘In a new kind of poetry that isn’t just poetry, not just writing, much more than that, I can capture this very thing, this principle, this purity.’
    Then, with Richard Perry and Fred Curran in a room in Gray’s Inn which Curran treated like his own, though Ann never knew whether he actually lived there, Robert simply continued his talk, as if different time and place and audience had no need to interrupt the monologue.