CHAPTER XXV.

So the months passed by and became years, fulfilling their course with that terrible speed which sows the earth so thick with graves.

I stitched on for the people of Rome, and the people said, "He grows old; he has no sport in him; let him be;" and very often therefore passed me by to hurry to another stall before the old stone mouth of Truth, where there was a newly-come cobbler of leather who had a very comical wit and had very cheap prices. I do not know whether his work wore well. But I made enough to live on and get bread for Palès. That sufficed.

Very often I would go and look at my lost Hermes in the gallery of the Vatican. I might as well never have sold him; but we know everything too late.

And when the gaping foreign crowds, all frothy talk and not a shred of knowledge or reverence amidst them, gathered round the pedestal he stood on, and praised him, I wanted to cry out to them, "Stand aside, ye fools! He is mine."

But he was not mine any more.

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Sometimes I used to wonder, would she be sorry if she knew that I had lost him?

But no doubt he was better there, and more fittingly in place with the Jupiter Axur in the palace of the Pope. I had never been great enough for him; I had only loved him; and what use was that?

Time wore away, I say, and took the days and the weeks and the months, and Rome was swept with the by-winds of winter and scorched with the sand-blasts of the summer, and its travertine and its porphyry, and its old brick that has the hues of porphyry, were transfigured into matchless glory with every sun that set; and my Ariadne came thither no more.

Where was she? I knew not. She was not forsaken, since Maryx stayed on in the city always, and I knew well that he would not forget that unuttered oath by the Cross.

He was shut forever in his room at work, they said. To my sight, all the greatness had gone out of his work. But the world did not see it. Before a great fame the world is a myope.

The cunning of his hand, and the force of it, and the grace, were all there as of old, of course; for the consummate artist, by long mastery of his art, does acquire at last what is almost a mechanical aptitude, and can scarcely do ill, so far as mere form goes, even working with blind eyes. But the soul of all art lies in the artist's own delight in it; and that was now lacking forever in his. These things that he created had no joy for him.

Men and women losing the thing they love lose much, but the artist loses far more: for him are slaughtered all the children of his dreams, and from him are driven all the fair companions of his solitude.

Maryx labored by day and by night in his house upon the Golden Hill; but it was labor; it was no more creation, and the delight of creation. He worked from habit, from pride, to save himself perhaps from madness; for there is no friend or physician like work; but his old mother had said rightly,--he was like a dead man. He had never spoken any word to me of her since that night in the amphitheatre. Indeed, I saw him but seldom. I felt that my presence was pain to him, and I felt remorse. Why had I compelled Fortune and brought this evil upon him in the midst of his lofty, | | 267 peaceful, and victorious life? We are sorry meddlers, and play with Fate too much.

He had never reproached me; but for that very forbearance my own conscience but rebuked me the more.

One day I met him in the park of the Pamfili Doria: they are very grand and lovely, these woods, with their slopes of grass that are like the moorlands of the North, and their old gnarled oaks, and their empurpled hoards of violets, that are so many you cannot tread in winter without crushing half a million little fragrant hooded heads.

I had gone on an errand with a gardener's hob-nailed shoes; he was walking against the wind, as men walk who would escape from ghosts that will keep pace with them, ghosts that the sunlight never scares away.

He almost struck against me as he passed, and, pausing, recognized me.

It was twilight in a wintry eve; the sea-breeze was sweeping keen and cold through the branches of the pines; the swans and the statues by the water's edge looked chill and shadowy; the bold uplands of the shelving turf were crisp with glistening frost; the owls were hooting.

He looked at me in the sad twilight which lasts but such a little moment here in Rome.

"It is you!" he said, with a gentle voice. "My old friend, have I been neglectful of you, or unkind? I have not seen you for so long. But if there be anything you ever want of me----"

"Nay, there is nothing," I said to him. "And we only hurt each other. We both are waiting----"

Then I stopped, afraid that I should wound him; for he was very proud in some things.

"Come home with me now," he said, abruptly, taking no notice of my last words. "Come home with me. You shall see my work. Rome holds no better critic."

Then he turned, and we went downwards through the park, under the broad branches of the ilexes, and the owls flapped in our faces, and the darkness fell, and the swans went off the water to their nests among the reeds; and we walked together through the gates and to his own house, which was not far distant, and where I had never been since the day that I had seen the Nausicaa shattered on the floor.

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The place was almost dark. We entered his studio, and he struck a light, and I began to see the glimmer of the marble's and the plaster's whiteness. We had walked quite in silence: what could we say to each other, he and I?

He drew the shrouding cloths off a great group, and the lights from above fell on it.

Its name matters nothing: it stands to-day before the senate-house of a great nation. It was a composition from the heroic age. It was majestic, pure, and solemn; there was not a false line in it, nor a weak one; it had the consummate ease and strength that only the trained hand of a perfect master can command; yet----

What was it lacking in it?

It was hard to tell. But it was lifeless. It was work, composition, not art. It was like a dead body from which the soul has fled. I looked at it in silence.

"Well?" he asked, and watched my face. Then, before I could measure my words to tell the truth yet veil it, he, scanning my face, read my mind, and cast the cloths back again, and laughed aloud,--a laugh that I can hear still when I sit and think and the night is quiet.

"Ah, it does not deceive you any more than me! You see it aright. It is imposture. It will cheat the world. It cannot cheat you or me. It is a lie. Look at it: it is the first thing I ever sold to any man that has no shadow of myself put into it, no beauty in my sight, no preciousness or gladness for me, no thought or soul of mine blent with it to make it as strong and holy as a man's labors can be. It is a lie. It is not art: it is cold, hard, joyless, measured, mechanical,--like any stone creature that the copyist sits and chips from some plaster model of the galleries, and calls a god! I always thought so, felt so. Who knows our work as we the makers do? And now I am certain, looking on your face. Hush! Do not speak. Tell me no lies. The thing is lie enough."

I was silent.

It was of no use to seek to foist on him the empty phrases of an artificial compliment; he would have seen through them and despised me.

The light from above fell on the half-shrouded group and on his face: his eyes had a terrible anguish in them, such as | | 269 one could picture in a wounded lion's that feels his mighty strength ebbing away and cannot rise again.

The lamp that he held he dashed upon the floor; the flame was extinguished on the stone.

"Look at that light!" he said. "A moment, less than a moment, and it is quenched,--just falling: that is the light in us who think ourselves the light of the world. One blow, and we are in darkness forever. We make Zeus in rage and Christ with pity; we should make them both only laughing: any god must laugh. Look! men have called me great, and stronger than most of them I may have been; and they will go on calling me great, and great everything that I do, sheerly from habit's sake, and the force of memories, and the imitation of numbers. But for me, I know very well I shall never be great any more. The cunning may stay in my hand, but the soul is gone out of my body, and the art in me is dead. I am an artist no more. No more!"

He was silent a little while, gazing out through the unshuttered windows into the starless night. The quenched lamp lay at his feet.

"Look!" he said, suddenly, all the long-imprisoned suffering of so many months of silence breaking loose like a river long pent up and breaking its banks. "Look! From a little lad, all I cared for was art. Going behind my mule over the stony ground, I saw only the images I had seen in the churches, and the faces of the gods, and the saints. Starving and homeless in Paris, I was happy as a bird of the air, because the day showed me beautiful shapes, and by night in sleep I saw lovelier still. When fame came to me, and the praises of men, and their triumphs, I was glad because by such means I could give my years to the studies I loved and the visions of my brain in palpable form to the people. Never once was I proud with the pride of a fool; but I was glad,--ah, God! I was glad. The stubborn stone obeyed me, submissive as a slave; I delighted in my strength; I knew my mastery; my labor was beautiful to me, and waking I thought of it and went to it as to the sweetest mistress that could smile on earth. When one loves an art, it is the love of the creator and of the offspring both in one; it is the joy of the lover and of the child; when it fails us, what can the whole world give? And now in me it is dead,--dead,--dead. I care for the | | 270 marble no more than the workman that hews it for daily bread. It says nothing to me now. It is blank and cold, and I curse it. I shall never make it speak any more. I am palsied before I am old!"

Then his head drooped upon his breast; he dropped down on the bench beside him, and covered his face with his hands.

He had forgotten that I was there.

I went away in silence, and left him, not to see a great man weep.

What comfort could one give to him?

Verily the sculptures of the Greeks were right. Love burns up the soul.