CHAPTER VIII.

"MY dear, you have genius," said Maryx to her, with emotion in his voice, when he came on the morrow and offered her his aid and his instruction with that noble frankness which was a part of him; he was touched by her beauty, but he was more touched by the love of his own art, which had been born in and lived with her on those lonely Ligurian shores.

"You have genius," he said, standing by my Greek Hermes. "And I am sure you knew: genius is nobility, and, like nobility, is obligation."

"Yes," she said, simply, with her great eyes fixed on him. She did not say anything more, but he felt that she understood him.

"I wish to learn," she added, after a pause. "I see such beautiful things, but they go away like dreams: I cannot make them stay. It was so with my father."

"It is so with all of us; with all artists," said Maryx. "Our dreams are like Etruscan tombs. When we break into them with the noise of the world, the crowned shapes vanish; if we can grasp a little of the gold, a fragment of the purple, it is all we can do to bring what we have seen out to others, and show that we have been with 'the gods that sleep.' Since | | 104 you have such dreams and would tell them to others, come and learn with me. At least--you scarcely want to learn: you chiefly want to acquire facility, and accuracy, and they only come from long practice and a kind of study that is tedious. I modeled the human arm for three years before I could perfectly content myself; and even now--none but a fool is content with himself. And even my poor fool Nero never was that quite. I am sorry for Nero: are not you? If he had not been Cæsar, and so cursed, he might have been a harmless harper all his days."

"A lovely child," said Maryx to me by my stall that day. "Most lovely. And what a fate! You must let me share in your innocent cheat, and you must make believe for me that her work in my studio is worth a price. A young female thing like that must want so many comforts, so many graces, about her: how can we persuade her, she seems so proud----"

"Let her be so," said I. "And she does not want much. She has been reared in all privations, except those of the mind. She is hardy, and simple in her tastes: why spoil them?"

"If she were a lad,--no. But a girl---- May-be, though, you are right. What pleases me the most in her is her impersonal love of art. She has no idea of seeking reputation for herself, of being 'great,' as little souls all seek to be: she only wishes to learn because she sees 'beautiful things.' That is very rare. Well, let her come to me to-morrow. She shall have what good I can give to her. And I will do my best by her in all ways that I can,--you are sure of that."

He held his hand out to me as he spoke,--the firm and delicate hand that had called such noble shapes out of the lifeless rocks.

I was sure. The faith of Maryx was strong as the marble that he carved, and as pure from stain. Yet I was not quite satisfied as I resumed my stitching under my Apollo and Crispin; I had meddled with Fate; it is presumptuous work for a mortal.

"Dig not the isthmus there, nor cut it through. Jove would have made a channel had he wished it so," said the Oracle to the Cnidians. And we are always cutting the isthmus and letting the sea run in, thinking we know more than Jove. No wonder all Oracles are tired and. silent nowadays.

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Perhaps, too, my misgivings were half compounded of selfishness. I had found her,--had done my best by her; I should have liked to be her only friend:--only I could not isolate her so with any justice to her.

Maryx was a noble-hearted man as well as great. I ought to have stitched on with a lighter mind after he had left me, but I did not.

I was afraid that he would lead her from her simple habits with too generous gifts. Not that he was otherwise than most simple in his own taste, but, like many manly men who have borne with indifference the full force of poverty and labor, he had a horror of them as befalling women.

Now myself I have seen "the marriage of Saint Francis" productive enough of peace, and I do not believe it is the lack of riches that makes misery half so much as it is the desire of them.

The modern ideal of joy lies in riches. I think it is a wrong one,--certainly wrong to be placed before the people.

You think the Lancashire operative, drinking himself drunk with strong wines, and gorging every day on meat, under the smoke of a thousand furnaces, without a blade of grass or a hand's-breadth of clear sky near him for a dozen square miles, is higher and nearer happiness than the Southern peasant, in the width of glorious air, with the yellow corn and the gray olive and the green vine about him, because he can eat but a few leaves or some chestnut bread with an onion.

Are you not very wrong? Can there be a doubt that the purer, fresher existence is far the happier, as it is far the healthier?

And even in the matter of intelligence, the true balance may incline another way than it is your fashion to think.

"Why do you call your dog Giordano?" said I once to a Tuscan contadino, who could neither read nor write. He looked at me with surprise.

"Did you never hear of Lucca Giordano?" said he. "He was one of our artists in the old time."

Now pray tell me, would your Lancashire workman, yelling hideous songs in his music-hall, or chuckling in a rat-pit, be likely to call his dog Reynolds or Gainsborough, and say to you, "that was a painter of ours"?

There are two sides to the medal of Progress. Myself I | | 106 cannot see that New York is so much an improvement upon Athens, nor the Staffordshire potteries upon Etruscan Tarquinii. But then I am only an ignorant man, no doubt, and born a Trasteverino, who loves the happy laugh of the sun-fed children and the unobscured smile of the azure skies.

"Did Hilarion see her?" Maryx asked me next day, when I took her up to his studio, while the nightingales were still singing in the early morning. When I told him no, he smiled and frowned both at once, in a way that he had.

"If he had, he said, "he would have stayed."

"But he is not coming back for a year," said I, with a vague misgiving following his thoughts.

"He may always stay away for ten years; he may always be back to-morrow," said Maryx.

As for her, she was so entranced among all that marble, and so absorbed in the sense that she might follow her father's art there as she chose, that she had no remembrance of Maryx or of me. Only once, before the Actæa, she turned her eyes on him, full of reverence and of delight.

"You are great, as the Greeks were," she said, breathlessly.

Maryx, whom the adulation of courts and courtiers had never moved more than the stone that he wrought in could be moved by the breeze, colored suddenly, like any woman. He was pleased.

"My dear, no modern can be great," he said, with a smile. "We at our best only echo and repeat. Beside Alexander and Cæsar, Napoleon did very little. It is the same thing in the Arts. That is why I envy musicians. Their art is still only in its infancy; it is the only one that has not been excelled in past all excelling."

"But there is something there which they would not have had," said the child, thoughtfully, meaning the classic sculptors by her they*. "They would not have understood Actæa's pain: they would only have permitted it had Nero been a warrior and strong and heroic."

"You mean that we moderns can sympathize with weakness and failure. Perhaps it is because we are weak, and because we fail," said Maryx. "You may be right, however. The chief characteristic, the only originality, of all modern art, does lie in its expressions of sympathy. We have ceased to think sorrow shameful; we have exalted the emotions; we | | 107 analyze and we pity; we should hoot the first Brutus, and send the second to prison: we prefer affection to duty. Perhaps we are right, but this weakness emasculates us. And you,--do you sympathize with Actæa? Would you not have let that base cur lie unburied in the sand-holes?"

She was silent a moment, thinking.

"No," she said, slowly; "no, I think not. You see, she loved him; and he had loved her,--once."

"We are wasting time," said Maryx, shortly. "There is a square of clay upon its base within there. Look! if you have an idea, show me what you would do. But that is only for to-day: afterwards you must model what I give you to copy, and that only; and I shall make you design in black and white a long time before I allow you to touch clay and marble. Your anatomy is all at fault. In your wingless Love the shoulders are impossible. And listen: for myself I shall have little time to give you. For days you will not see me, even when I am in Rome. Giulio there, my foreman, will give you direction and instruction; and do not dream of Actæa, or of any other stories. Work,--and most of all at geometry, and at drawing from the record, for of natural aptitude you have only too much. You know, in all schools of sculpture it is an eternal dispute whether modeling or drawing be of the most importance,--as if both were not equally so! To acquire excellence, draw unceasingly and model unceasingly. If Michael Angelo would have deigned to model, instead of dashing with his chisel at the mound of marble, with no certain knowledge of what he meant to do, he would have spared himself the mistakes which make him often unequal and unworthy and would have made any lesser man ridiculous. You have great talent, but you need training: you are at present like a young poet who begins to write sonnets and epics of his own before he has studied Homer or read Virgil."

She looked at him with such humid and rapturous eyes of gratitude that they would have moved a man far colder than Maryx, who had the warm blood of Provence in his veins.

"I do thank you so much, only I say it ill," she murmured. "To be with a great master in Rome, that is what I have always dreamt of; and you are great!"

His face grew warm.

"No, no," he said, with a certain emotion in his voice. | | 108 "We are not great nowadays: we echo the past when we are at our best; we do hardly more. And for me, my dear, to do what little I can for youth, is to do no more than to pay my debt. I owe it to my country to give a little back for all she did to me. Only think what it was for a lad of eighteen to come here to the Villa of Sallust. Think what it was for me, having known nothing but hunger and toil and effort, the stone-quarries of Provence, and the stone wilderness of Paris,--having worked in wretched garrets, always fireless in winter, often breadless in summer, seldom, indeed, being able to tell one night whether I should get food enough next day to keep breath in me,--think what it was for me to be suddenly transported from all that famine and misery and almost hopeless conflict, to that matchless scene, to that enchanting existence! To sit and read in the tapestried library; to lean over the balcony and look across Rome and its plains to the very sea; to wake at sunrise and know that all day long there was no necessity to do anything, except to study the great marbles and the lovely frescoes, that 'drew one's soul outward through the eyes,' and to commune with the dead and try and beguile out of them the lost secrets of the arts! Ah! if ever perfect peace were upon earth, I knew it then in my boyish years at the Villa Medici. I wish I could give such years to any young life that loves the Arts. Athens herself never had a nobler thought than those years France gives her students. Only one ought to do things so much greater after them. The uttermost one achieves seems but sorry payment. There is an idea, general enough, that talent is best left alone to sink or swim. I fear that many sink who might be worth the saving. The soul may perish for sheer lack of a spoonful of soup in the mouth. Protagenes might be now a household word, like Apollos, if he had not had to live on a handful of beans, and have much trouble even in getting them. Buonarotti might have been greater without Leo and all the meddling , dictating cardinals, that is true; but if he had had to break stones for his daily bread, he would never have had time to look up and see the faces of Jehovah and the Sibyls. I am thankful to the Villa Medici, as a bird is to the hand that opens its cage-door and sets it free. It gave me the best gifts of life,--leisure and liberty. They are the twin genii that the poor can never see, Dioscuri that seldom lend their lance and | | 109 buckler save to a battle already won. If any aid of mine can bring them to your side, do not thank me; I only pay to your youth the debt that I owe to Rome for my own."

The full, deep sweetness of his voice was very gentle: he spoke thus to take from her any doubt or fear that she might feel, and he told her of himself that she might know he also had passed through the lonely efforts and the wistful visions that were her portion. Then he touched her gently :

"Come and see my mother. She is old, and cannot talk to you; but it will make you happier to think there is a woman near."

He shut the Actæa up in her darkness, with the nightingales singing outside, and went into another room to the lump of moist clay. Such a mere moist lump was once the Belvedere Mercury, the Thespian Love, and the Venus of Cleomenes.

Alexander used to say that the only things which made him doubt his immortality were sleep and love: I think the only things that may make men hope for theirs are love and Art.

In this room, where she was henceforth to work,--a bare place, of course, as sculptors' rooms must be, but with two great windows that looked through the orange-trees and cacti down the Golden Hill,--there stood a bust of a young man, with beautiful features, dreamful brows, and the firm, cold lips that you may see in the mouth of Adrian,--Adrian, who punished an epigram with death, and came to desire death unavailingly.

"How beautiful that is! It is some god!" she said, and paused before it.

"It is Hilarion," said Maryx. "It was done long ago----"

"Hilarion? He was a saint."

She had no love for saints: she knew that the Thebaïd had destroyed Olympus.

"Hilarion! What country is that name? Hilarion was a saint in the desert," she said, again: "he was a sorcerer, too; for he made the horse of Italicus win the chariot-race by a charm."

She said it seriously. To this girl, fed from birth on all the legends of the past ages, all these things were far more vivid and living than the people that went by her every day.

Maryx smiled.

"I think he is more sorcerer than saint; and he has won | | 110 the chariot-race with his own horses. His face and his form, too, served me for this also."

He drew the cloth off a statue of the Apollo Cythaerædus, a copy of one of his that had raised a storm of adulation round his name in the salons of Paris years before, and was now in the Pinacotheca of Munich.

It was different from any Apollo of the ancient marbles, and there was a certain melancholy in its divine dignity and perfect grace, as though the god had let fall his lyre out of very weariness, thinking that he who could move the very rocks by music, and tame the beasts of the forest and desert, and charm the souls of men with irresistible influence till they wept like little children, yet could be baffled and betrayed by the low cunning of his brother, of the boy whom men worshiped when they wished to lie and cheat.

"Oh, it is all wrong," said Maryx, as she gazed. "It is modern feeling; it is too subjective: it is not Greek at all; it is a poet, not a god. It is Alfred de Musset, it is not Apollo. Yes, the world went mad for it; but that is no proof of excellence. I have done better things, though one never creates as greatly as one imagines."

"He must be beautiful!" she said, under her breath, with her eyes lifted to the face of Apollo. "Is he as beautiful as that?" she asked.

Maryx threw a cloth over the bust.