We are the disinherited of Art! he cried. We are condemned to be superficial! We are excluded from the magic circle. The soil of American perception is a poor little barren artificial deposit. Yes! we are wedded to imperfection. An American, to excel, has just ten times as much to learn as a European. We lack the deeper sense. We have neither taste, nor tact, nor power. How should we have them? Our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present, the constant pressure about us of unlovely circumstance, are as void of all that nourishes and prompts and inspires the artist, as my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying so! We poor aspirants must live in perpetual exile.
You seem fairly at home in exile, I answered, and Florence seems to me a very pretty Siberia. But do you know my own thought? Nothing is so idle as to talk about our want of a nutritive soil, of opportunity, of inspiration, and all the rest of it. The worthy part is to do something fine! There is no law in our glorious Constitution against that. Invent, create, achieve! No matter if you have to study fifty times as much as one of these! What else are you an artist for? Be you our Moses, I added, laughing, and laying my hand on his shoulder, and lead us out of the house of bondage!
Golden wordsgolden words, young man! he cried, with a tender smile. Invent, create, achieve! Yes, thats our business; I know it well. Dont take me, in Heavens name, for one of your barren complainersimpotent cynics who have neither talent nor faith! I am at work!and he glanced about him and lowered his voice as if this were a quite peculiar secretIm at work night and day. I have undertaken a creation! I am no Moses; I am only a poor patient artist; but it would be a fine thing if I were to cause some slender stream of beauty to flow in our thirsty land! Dont think me a monster of conceit, he went on, as he saw me smile at the avidity with which he adopted my illustration; I confess that I am in one of those moods when great things seem possible! This is one of my nervous nightsI dream waking! When the south wind blows over Florence at midnight it seems to coax the soul from all the fair things locked away in her churches and galleries; it comes into my own little studio with the moonlight, and sets my heart beating too deeply for rest. You see I am always adding a thought to my conception! This evening I felt that I couldnt sleep unless I had communed with the genius of Buonarotti!
He seemed deeply versed in local history and tradition, and he expatiated con amore on the charms of Florence. I gathered that he was an old resident, and that he had taken the lovely city into his heart. I owe her everything, he declared. Its only since I came here that I have really lived, intellectually. One by one, all profane desires, all mere worldly aims, have dropped away from me, and left me nothing but my pencil, my little note-book (and he tapped his breast-pocket), and the worship of the pure mastersthose who were pure because they were innocent, and those who were pure because they were strong!
And have you been very productive all this time? I asked sympathetically.
He was silent a while before replying. Not in the vulgar sense! he said at last. I have chosen never to manifest myself by imperfection. The good in every performance I have re-absorbed into the generative force of new creations; the badthere is always plenty of thatI have religiously destroyed. I may say, with some satisfaction, that I have not added a mite to the rubbish of the world. As a proof of my conscientiousnessand he stopped short, and eyed me with extraordinary candour, as if the proof were to be overwhelmingI have never sold a picture! At least no merchant traffics in my heart! Do you remember that divine line in Browning? My little studio has never been profaned by superficial, feverish, mercenary work. Its a temple of labour, but of leisure! Art is long. If we work for ourselves, of course we must hurry. If we work for her, we must often pause. She can wait!
This had brought us to my hotel door, somewhat to my relief, I confess, for I had begun to feel unequal to the society of a genius of this heroic strain. I left him, however, not without expressing a friendly hope that we should meet again. The next morning my curiosity had not abated; I was anxious to see him by common daylight. I counted upon meeting him in one of the many pictorial haunts of Florence, and I was gratified without delay. I found him in the course of the morning in the Tribune of the Uffizithat little treasure-chamber of world-famous things. He had turned his back on the Venus de Medici, and with his arms resting on the rail-mug which protects the pictures, and his head buried in his hands, he was lost in the contemplation of that superb triptych of Andrea Mantegnaa work which has neither the material splendour nor the commanding force of some of its neighbours, but which, glowing there with the loveliness of patient labour, suits possibly a more constant need of the soul. I looked at the picture for some time over his shoulder; at last, with a heavy sigh, he turned away and our eyes met. As he recognised me a deep blush rose to his face; he fancied, perhaps, that he had made a fool of himself overnight. But I offered him my hand with a friendliness which assured him I was not a scoffer. I knew him by his ardent chevelure; otherwise he was much altered. His midnight mood was over, and he looked as haggard as an actor by daylight. He was far older than I had supposed, and he had less bravery of costume and gesture. He seemed the quiet, poor, patient artist he had proclaimed himself, and the fact that he had never sold a picture was more obvious than glorious. His velvet coat was threadbare, and his short slouched hat, of an antique pattern, revealed a rustiness which marked it an original, and not one of the picturesque reproductions which brethren of his craft affect. His eye was mild and heavy, and his expression singularly gentle and acquiescent; the more so for a certain pallid leanness of visage, which I hardly knew whether to refer to the consuming fire of genius or to a meagre diet. A very little talk, however, cleared his brow and brought back his eloquence.
And this is your first visit to these enchanted halls? he cried. Happy, thrice happy youth! And taking me by the arm, he prepared to lead me to each of the pre-eminent works in turn and show me the cream of the gallery. But before we left the Mantegna he pressed my arm and gave it a loving look. He was not in a hurry, he murmured. He knew nothing of raw Haste, half-sister to Delay! How sound a critic my friend was I am unable to say, but he was an extremely amusing one; overflowing with opinions, theories, and sympathies, with disquisition and gossip and anecdote. He was a shade too sentimental for my own sympathies, and I fancied he was rather too fond of superfine discriminations and of discovering subtle intentions in shallow places. At moments, too, he plunged into the sea of metaphysics, and floundered a while in waters too deep for intellectual security. But his abounding knowledge and happy judgment told a touching story of long attentive hours in this worshipful company; there was a reproach to my wasteful saunterings in so devoted a culture of opportunity. There are two moods, I remember his saying, in which we may walk through galleriesthe critical and the ideal. They seize us at their pleasure, and we can never tell which is to take its turn. The critical mood, oddly, is the genial one, the friendly, the condescending. It relishes the pretty trivialities of art, its vulgar cleverness, its conscious graces. It has a kindly greeting for anything which looks as if, according to his light, the painter had enjoyed doing itfor the little Dutch cabbages and kettles, for the taper fingers and breezy mantles of late-coming Madonnas, for the little blue-hilled, pastoral, sceptical Italian landscapes. Then there are the days of fierce, fastidious longingsolemn church feasts of the intellectwhen all vulgar effort and all petty success is a weariness, and everything but the bestthe best of the bestdisgusts. In these hours we are relentless aristocrats of taste. We will not take Michael Angelo for granted, we will not swallow Raphael whole!