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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Madonna of the Future, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Madonna of the Future
+
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: May 8, 2005  [eBook #2460]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MADONNA OF THE FUTURE***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1887 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk, proofed by Jennifer Austin.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MADONNA OF THE FUTURE
+by Henry James
+
+
+We had been talking about the masters who had achieved but a single
+masterpiece--the artists and poets who but once in their lives had known
+the divine afflatus and touched the high level of perfection.  Our host
+had been showing us a charming little cabinet picture by a painter whose
+name we had never heard, and who, after this single spasmodic bid for
+fame, had apparently relapsed into obscurity and mediocrity.  There was
+some discussion as to the frequency of this phenomenon; during which, I
+observed, H--- sat silent, finishing his cigar with a meditative air, and
+looking at the picture which was being handed round the table.  "I don't
+know how common a case it is," he said at last, "but I have seen it.  I
+have known a poor fellow who painted his one masterpiece, and"--he added
+with a smile--"he didn't even paint that.  He made his bid for fame and
+missed it."  We all knew H--- for a clever man who had seen much of men
+and manners, and had a great stock of reminiscences.  Some one
+immediately questioned him further, and while I was engrossed with the
+raptures of my neighbour over the little picture, he was induced to tell
+his tale.  If I were to doubt whether it would bear repeating, I should
+only have to remember how that charming woman, our hostess, who had left
+the table, ventured back in rustling rose-colour to pronounce our
+lingering a want of gallantry, and, finding us a listening circle, sank
+into her chair in spite of our cigars, and heard the story out so
+graciously that, when the catastrophe was reached, she glanced across at
+me and showed me a tear in each of her beautiful eyes.
+
+* * * * *
+
+It relates to my youth, and to Italy: two fine things!  (H--- began).  I
+had arrived late in the evening at Florence, and while I finished my
+bottle of wine at supper, had fancied that, tired traveller though I was,
+I might pay the city a finer compliment than by going vulgarly to bed.  A
+narrow passage wandered darkly away out of the little square before my
+hotel, and looked as if it bored into the heart of Florence.  I followed
+it, and at the end of ten minutes emerged upon a great piazza, filled
+only with the mild autumn moonlight.  Opposite rose the Palazzo Vecchio,
+like some huge civic fortress, with the great bell-tower springing from
+its embattled verge as a mountain-pine from the edge of a cliff.  At its
+base, in its projected shadow, gleamed certain dim sculptures which I
+wonderingly approached.  One of the images, on the left of the palace
+door, was a magnificent colossus, shining through the dusky air like a
+sentinel who has taken the alarm.  In a moment I recognised him as
+Michael Angelo's _David_.  I turned with a certain relief from his
+sinister strength to a slender figure in bronze, stationed beneath the
+high light loggia, which opposes the free and elegant span of its arches
+to the dead masonry of the palace; a figure supremely shapely and
+graceful; gentle, almost, in spite of his holding out with his light
+nervous arm the snaky head of the slaughtered Gorgon.  His name is
+Perseus, and you may read his story, not in the Greek mythology, but in
+the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini.  Glancing from one of these fine
+fellows to the other, I probably uttered some irrepressible commonplace
+of praise, for, as if provoked by my voice, a man rose from the steps of
+the loggia, where he had been sitting in the shadow, and addressed me in
+good English--a small, slim personage, clad in a sort of black velvet
+tunic (as it seemed), and with a mass of auburn hair, which gleamed in
+the moonlight, escaping from a little mediaeval birretta.  In a tone of
+the most insinuating deference he asked me for my "impressions."  He
+seemed picturesque, fantastic, slightly unreal.  Hovering there in this
+consecrated neighbourhood, he might have passed for the genius of
+aesthetic hospitality--if the genius of aesthetic hospitality were not
+commonly some shabby little custode, flourishing a calico
+pocket-handkerchief and openly resentful of the divided franc.  This
+analogy was made none the less complete by the brilliant tirade with
+which he greeted my embarrassed silence.
+
+"I have known Florence long, sir, but I have never known her so lovely as
+tonight.  It's as if the ghosts of her past were abroad in the empty
+streets.  The present is sleeping; the past hovers about us like a dream
+made visible.  Fancy the old Florentines strolling up in couples to pass
+judgment on the last performance of Michael, of Benvenuto!  We should
+come in for a precious lesson if we might overhear what they say.  The
+plainest burgher of them, in his cap and gown, had a taste in the matter!
+That was the prime of art, sir.  The sun stood high in heaven, and his
+broad and equal blaze made the darkest places bright and the dullest eyes
+clear.  We live in the evening of time!  We grope in the gray dusk,
+carrying each our poor little taper of selfish and painful wisdom,
+holding it up to the great models and to the dim idea, and seeing nothing
+but overwhelming greatness and dimness.  The days of illumination are
+gone!  But do you know I fancy--I fancy"--and he grew suddenly almost
+familiar in this visionary fervour--"I fancy the light of that time rests
+upon us here for an hour!  I have never seen the David so grand, the
+Perseus so fair!  Even the inferior productions of John of Bologna and of
+Baccio Bandinelli seem to realise the artist's dream.  I feel as if the
+moonlit air were charged with the secrets of the masters, and as if,
+standing here in religious attention, we might--we might witness a
+revelation!"  Perceiving at this moment, I suppose, my halting
+comprehension reflected in my puzzled face, this interesting rhapsodist
+paused and blushed.  Then with a melancholy smile, "You think me a
+moonstruck charlatan, I suppose.  It's not my habit to bang about the
+piazza and pounce upon innocent tourists.  But tonight, I confess, I am
+under the charm.  And then, somehow, I fancied you too were an artist!"
+
+"I am not an artist, I am sorry to say, as you must understand the term.
+But pray make no apologies.  I am also under the charm; your eloquent
+remarks have only deepened it."
+
+"If you are not an artist you are worthy to be one!" he rejoined, with an
+expressive smile.  "A young man who arrives at Florence late in the
+evening, and, instead of going prosaically to bed, or hanging over the
+traveller's book at his hotel, walks forth without loss of time to pay
+his devoirs to the beautiful, is a young man after my own heart!"
+
+The mystery was suddenly solved; my friend was an American!  He must have
+been, to take the picturesque so prodigiously to heart.  "None the less
+so, I trust," I answered, "if the young man is a sordid New Yorker."
+
+"New Yorkers have been munificent patrons of art!" he answered, urbanely.
+
+For a moment I was alarmed.  Was this midnight reverie mere Yankee
+enterprise, and was he simply a desperate brother of the brush who had
+posted himself here to extort an "order" from a sauntering tourist?  But
+I was not called to defend myself.  A great brazen note broke suddenly
+from the far-off summit of the bell-tower above us, and sounded the first
+stroke of midnight.  My companion started, apologised for detaining me,
+and prepared to retire.  But he seemed to offer so lively a promise of
+further entertainment that I was indisposed to part with him, and
+suggested that we should stroll homeward together.  He cordially
+assented; so we turned out of the Piazza, passed down before the statued
+arcade of the Uffizi, and came out upon the Arno.  What course we took I
+hardly remember, but we roamed slowly about for an hour, my companion
+delivering by snatches a sort of moon-touched aesthetic lecture.  I
+listened in puzzled fascination, and wondered who the deuce he was.  He
+confessed with a melancholy but all-respectful head-shake to his American
+origin.
+
+"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 words--golden words, young man!" he cried, with a tender smile.
+"'Invent, create, achieve!'  Yes, that's our business; I know it well.
+Don't take me, in Heaven's name, for one of your barren
+complainers--impotent 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 secret--"I'm 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!  Don't 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 nights--I 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 couldn't 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.  "It's 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 masters--those 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 bad--there is always plenty of that--I 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
+conscientiousness"--and he stopped short, and eyed me with extraordinary
+candour, as if the proof were to be overwhelming--"I 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.  It's 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
+Uffizi--that 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
+Mantegna--a 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
+galleries--the 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 it--for 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
+longing--solemn church feasts of the intellect--when all vulgar effort
+and all petty success is a weariness, and everything but the best--the
+best of the best--disgusts.  In these hours we are relentless aristocrats
+of taste.  We will not take Michael Angelo for granted, we will not
+swallow Raphael whole!"
+
+The gallery of the Uffizi is not only rich in its possessions, but
+peculiarly fortunate in that fine architectural accident, as one may call
+it, which unites it--with the breadth of river and city between them--to
+those princely chambers of the Pitti Palace.  The Louvre and the Vatican
+hardly give you such a sense of sustained inclosure as those long
+passages projected over street and stream to establish a sort of
+inviolate transition between the two palaces of art.  We passed along the
+gallery in which those precious drawings by eminent hands hang chaste and
+gray above the swirl and murmur of the yellow Arno, and reached the ducal
+saloons of the Pitti.  Ducal as they are, it must be confessed that they
+are imperfect as show-rooms, and that, with their deep-set windows and
+their massive mouldings, it is rather a broken light that reaches the
+pictured walls.  But here the masterpieces hang thick, and you seem to
+see them in a luminous atmosphere of their own.  And the great saloons,
+with their superb dim ceilings, their outer wall in splendid shadow, and
+the sombre opposite glow of mellow canvas and dusky gilding, make,
+themselves, almost as fine a picture as the Titians and Raphaels they
+imperfectly reveal.  We lingered briefly before many a Raphael and
+Titian; but I saw my friend was impatient, and I suffered him at last to
+lead me directly to the goal of our journey--the most tenderly fair of
+Raphael's virgins, the Madonna in the Chair.  Of all the fine pictures of
+the world, it seemed to me this is the one with which criticism has least
+to do.  None betrays less effort, less of the mechanism of success and of
+the irrepressible discord between conception and result, which shows
+dimly in so many consummate works.  Graceful, human, near to our
+sympathies as it is, it has nothing of manner, of method, nothing,
+almost, of style; it blooms there in rounded softness, as instinct with
+harmony as if it were an immediate exhalation of genius.  The figure
+melts away the spectator's mind into a sort of passionate tenderness
+which he knows not whether he has given to heavenly purity or to earthly
+charm.  He is intoxicated with the fragrance of the tenderest blossom of
+maternity that ever bloomed on earth.
+
+"That's what I call a fine picture," said my companion, after we had
+gazed a while in silence.  "I have a right to say so, for I have copied
+it so often and so carefully that I could repeat it now with my eyes
+shut.  Other works are of Raphael: this _is_ Raphael himself.  Others you
+can praise, you can qualify, you can measure, explain, account for: this
+you can only love and admire.  I don't know in what seeming he walked
+among men while this divine mood was upon him; but after it, surely, he
+could do nothing but die; this world had nothing more to teach him.  Think
+of it a while, my friend, and you will admit that I am not raving.  Think
+of his seeing that spotless image, not for a moment, for a day, in a
+happy dream, or a restless fever-fit; not as a poet in a five minutes'
+frenzy--time to snatch his phrase and scribble his immortal stanza; but
+for days together, while the slow labour of the brush went on, while the
+foul vapours of life interposed, and the fancy ached with tension, fixed,
+radiant, distinct, as we see it now!  What a master, certainly!  But ah!
+what a seer!"
+
+"Don't you imagine," I answered, "that he had a model, and that some
+pretty young woman--"
+
+"As pretty a young woman as you please!  It doesn't diminish the miracle!
+He took his hint, of course, and the young woman, possibly, sat smiling
+before his canvas.  But, meanwhile, the painter's idea had taken wings.
+No lovely human outline could charm it to vulgar fact.  He saw the fair
+form made perfect; he rose to the vision without tremor, without effort
+of wing; he communed with it face to face, and resolved into finer and
+lovelier truth the purity which completes it as the fragrance completes
+the rose.  That's what they call idealism; the word's vastly abused, but
+the thing is good.  It's my own creed, at any rate.  Lovely Madonna,
+model at once and muse, I call you to witness that I too am an idealist!"
+
+"An idealist, then," I said, half jocosely, wishing to provoke him to
+further utterance, "is a gentleman who says to Nature in the person of a
+beautiful girl, 'Go to, you are all wrong!  Your fine is coarse, your
+bright is dim, your grace is _gaucherie_.  This is the way you should
+have done it!'  Is not the chance against him?"
+
+He turned upon me almost angrily, but perceiving the genial savour of my
+sarcasm, he smiled gravely.  "Look at that picture," he said, "and cease
+your irreverent mockery!  Idealism is _that_!  There's no explaining it;
+one must feel the flame!  It says nothing to Nature, or to any beautiful
+girl, that they will not both forgive!  It says to the fair woman,
+'Accept me as your artist friend, lend me your beautiful face, trust me,
+help me, and your eyes shall be half my masterpiece!'  No one so loves
+and respects the rich realities of nature as the artist whose imagination
+caresses and flatters them.  He knows what a fact may hold (whether
+Raphael knew, you may judge by his portrait, behind us there, of Tommaso
+Inghirami); bad his fancy hovers above it, as Ariel hovered above the
+sleeping prince.  There is only one Raphael, bad an artist may still be
+an artist.  As I said last night, the days of illumination are gone;
+visions are rare; we have to look long to see them.  But in meditation we
+may still cultivate the ideal; round it, smooth it, perfect it.  The
+result--the result," (here his voice faltered suddenly, and he fixed his
+eyes for a moment on the picture; when they met my own again they were
+full of tears)--"the result may be less than this; but still it may be
+good, it may be _great_!" he cried with vehemence.  "It may hang
+somewhere, in after years, in goodly company, and keep the artist's
+memory warm.  Think of being known to mankind after some such fashion as
+this! of hanging here through the slow centuries in the gaze of an
+altered world; living on and on in the cunning of an eye and hand that
+are part of the dust of ages, a delight and a law to remote generations;
+making beauty a force and purity an example!"
+
+"Heaven forbid," I said, smiling, "that I should take the wind out of
+your sails!  But doesn't it occur to you that, besides being strong in
+his genius, Raphael was happy in a certain good faith of which we have
+lost the trick?  There are people, I know, who deny that his spotless
+Madonnas are anything more than pretty blondes of that period enhanced by
+the Raphaelesque touch, which they declare is a profane touch.  Be that
+as it may, people's religious and aesthetic needs went arm in arm, and
+there was, as I may say, a demand for the Blessed Virgin, visible and
+adorable, which must have given firmness to the artist's hand.  I am
+afraid there is no demand now."
+
+My companion seemed painfully puzzled; he shivered, as it were, in this
+chilling blast of scepticism.  Then shaking his head with sublime
+confidence--"There is always a demand!" he cried; "that ineffable type is
+one of the eternal needs of man's heart; but pious souls long for it in
+silence, almost in shame.  Let it appear, and their faith grows brave.
+How _should_ it appear in this corrupt generation?  It cannot be made to
+order.  It could, indeed, when the order came, trumpet-toned, from the
+lips of the Church herself, and was addressed to genius panting with
+inspiration.  But it can spring now only from the soil of passionate
+labour and culture.  Do you really fancy that while, from time to time, a
+man of complete artistic vision is born into the world, that image can
+perish?  The man who paints it has painted everything.  The subject
+admits of every perfection--form, colour, expression, composition.  It
+can be as simple as you please, and yet as rich; as broad and pure, and
+yet as full of delicate detail.  Think of the chance for flesh in the
+little naked, nestling child, irradiating divinity; of the chance for
+drapery in the chaste and ample garment of the mother! think of the great
+story you compress into that simple theme!  Think, above all, of the
+mother's face and its ineffable suggestiveness, of the mingled burden of
+joy and trouble, the tenderness turned to worship, and the worship turned
+to far-seeing pity!  Then look at it all in perfect line and lovely
+colour, breathing truth and beauty and mastery!"
+
+"Anch' io son pittore!" I cried.  "Unless I am mistaken, you have a
+masterpiece on the stocks.  If you put all that in, you will do more than
+Raphael himself did.  Let me know when your picture is finished, and
+wherever in the wide world I may be, I will post back to Florence and pay
+my respects to--the _Madonna of the future_!"
+
+He blushed vividly and gave a heavy sigh, half of protest, half of
+resignation.  "I don't often mention my picture by name.  I detest this
+modern custom of premature publicity.  A great work needs silence,
+privacy, mystery even.  And then, do you know, people are so cruel, so
+frivolous, so unable to imagine a man's wishing to paint a Madonna at
+this time of day, that I have been laughed at--laughed at, sir!" and his
+blush deepened to crimson.  "I don't know what has prompted me to be so
+frank and trustful with you.  You look as if you wouldn't laugh at me.  My
+dear young man"--and he laid his hand on my arm--"I am worthy of respect.
+Whatever my talents may be, I am honest.  There is nothing grotesque in a
+pure ambition, or in a life devoted to it."
+
+There was something so sternly sincere in his look and tone that further
+questions seemed impertinent.  I had repeated opportunity to ask them,
+however, for after this we spent much time together.  Daily for a
+fortnight, we met by appointment, to see the sights.  He knew the city so
+well, he had strolled and lounged so often through its streets and
+churches and galleries, he was so deeply versed in its greater and lesser
+memories, so imbued with the local genius, that he was an altogether
+ideal _valet de place_, and I was glad enough to leave my Murray at home,
+and gather facts and opinions alike from his gossiping commentary.  He
+talked of Florence like a lover, and admitted that it was a very old
+affair; he had lost his heart to her at first sight.  "It's the fashion
+to talk of all cities as feminine," he said, "but, as a rule, it's a
+monstrous mistake.  Is Florence of the same sex as New York, as Chicago?
+She is the sole perfect lady of them all; one feels towards her as a lad
+in his teens feels to some beautiful older woman with a 'history.'  She
+fills you with a sort of aspiring gallantry."  This disinterested passion
+seemed to stand my friend in stead of the common social ties; he led a
+lonely life, and cared for nothing but his work.  I was duly flattered by
+his having taken my frivolous self into his favour, and by his generous
+sacrifice of precious hours to my society.  We spent many of these hours
+among those early paintings in which Florence is so rich, returning ever
+and anon, with restless sympathies, to wonder whether these tender
+blossoms of art had not a vital fragrance and savour more precious than
+the full-fruited knowledge of the later works.  We lingered often in the
+sepulchral chapel of San Lorenzo, and watched Michael Angelo's
+dim-visaged warrior sitting there like some awful Genius of Doubt and
+brooding behind his eternal mask upon the mysteries of life.  We stood
+more than once in the little convent chambers where Fra Angelico wrought
+as if an angel indeed had held his hand, and gathered that sense of
+scattered dews and early bird-notes which makes an hour among his relics
+seem like a morning stroll in some monkish garden.  We did all this and
+much more--wandered into dark chapels, damp courts, and dusty
+palace-rooms, in quest of lingering hints of fresco and lurking treasures
+of carving.
+
+I was more and more impressed with my companion's remarkable singleness
+of purpose.  Everything was a pretext for some wildly idealistic rhapsody
+or reverie.  Nothing could be seen or said that did not lead him sooner
+or later to a glowing discourse on the true, the beautiful, and the good.
+If my friend was not a genius, he was certainly a monomaniac; and I found
+as great a fascination in watching the odd lights and shades of his
+character as if he had been a creature from another planet.  He seemed,
+indeed, to know very little of this one, and lived and moved altogether
+in his own little province of art.  A creature more unsullied by the
+world it is impossible to conceive, and I often thought it a flaw in his
+artistic character that he had not a harmless vice or two.  It amused me
+greatly at times to think that he was of our shrewd Yankee race; but,
+after all, there could be no better token of his American origin than
+this high aesthetic fever.  The very heat of his devotion was a sign of
+conversion; those born to European opportunity manage better to reconcile
+enthusiasm with comfort.  He had, moreover, all our native mistrust for
+intellectual discretion, and our native relish for sonorous superlatives.
+As a critic he was very much more generous than just, and his mildest
+terms of approbation were "stupendous," "transcendent," and
+"incomparable."  The small change of admiration seemed to him no coin for
+a gentleman to handle; and yet, frank as he was intellectually, he was
+personally altogether a mystery.  His professions, somehow, were all half-
+professions, and his allusions to his work and circumstances left
+something dimly ambiguous in the background.  He was modest and proud,
+and never spoke of his domestic matters.  He was evidently poor; yet he
+must have had some slender independence, since he could afford to make so
+merry over the fact that his culture of ideal beauty had never brought
+him a penny.  His poverty, I supposed, was his motive for neither
+inviting me to his lodging nor mentioning its whereabouts.  We met either
+in some public place or at my hotel, where I entertained him as freely as
+I might without appearing to be prompted by charity.  He seemed always
+hungry, and this was his nearest approach to human grossness.  I made a
+point of asking no impertinent questions, but, each time we met, I
+ventured to make some respectful allusion to the _magnum opus_, to
+inquire, as it were, as to its health and progress.  "We are getting on,
+with the Lord's help," he would say, with a grave smile.  "We are doing
+well.  You see, I have the grand advantage that I lose no time.  These
+hours I spend with you are pure profit.  They are _suggestive_!  Just as
+the truly religious soul is always at worship, the genuine artist is
+always in labour.  He takes his property wherever he finds it, and learns
+some precious secret from every object that stands up in the light.  If
+you but knew the rapture of observation!  I gather with every glance some
+hint for light, for colour, or relief!  When I get home, I pour out my
+treasures into the lap of toy Madonna.  Oh, I am not idle!  _Nulla dies
+sine linea_."
+
+I was introduced in Florence to an American lady whose drawing-room had
+long formed an attractive place of reunion for the foreign residents.  She
+lived on a fourth floor, and she was not rich; but she offered her
+visitors very good tea, little cakes at option, and conversation not
+quite to match.  Her conversation had mainly an aesthetic flavour, for
+Mrs. Coventry was famously "artistic."  Her apartment was a sort of Pitti
+Palace _au petit pied_.  She possessed "early masters" by the dozen--a
+cluster of Peruginos in her dining-room, a Giotto in her boudoir, an
+Andrea del Sarto over her drawing-room chimney-piece.  Surrounded by
+these treasures, and by innumerable bronzes, mosaics, majolica dishes,
+and little worm-eaten diptychs covered with angular saints on gilded
+backgrounds, our hostess enjoyed the dignity of a sort of high-priestess
+of the arts.  She always wore on her bosom a huge miniature copy of the
+Madonna della Seggiola.  Gaining her ear quietly one evening, I asked her
+whether she knew that remarkable man, Mr. Theobald.
+
+"Know him!" she exclaimed; "know poor Theobald!  All Florence knows him,
+his flame-coloured locks, his black velvet coat, his interminable
+harangues on the beautiful, and his wondrous Madonna that mortal eye has
+never seen, and that mortal patience has quite given up expecting."
+
+"Really," I cried, "you don't believe in his Madonna?"
+
+"My dear ingenuous youth," rejoined my shrewd friend, "has he made a
+convert of you?  Well, we all believed in him once; he came down upon
+Florence and took the town by storm.  Another Raphael, at the very least,
+had been born among men, and the poor dear United States were to have the
+credit of him.  Hadn't he the very hair of Raphael flowing down on his
+shoulders?  The hair, alas, but not the head!  We swallowed him whole,
+however; we hung upon his lips and proclaimed his genius on the house-
+tops.  The women were all dying to sit to him for their portraits and be
+made immortal, like Leonardo's Joconde.  We decided that his manner was a
+good deal like Leonardo's--mysterious, and inscrutable, and fascinating.
+Mysterious it certainly was; mystery was the beginning and the end of it.
+The months passed by, and the miracle hung fire; our master never
+produced his masterpiece.  He passed hours in the galleries and churches,
+posturing, musing, and gazing; he talked more than ever about the
+beautiful, but he never put brush to canvas.  We had all subscribed, as
+it were, to the great performance; but as it never came off people began
+to ask for their money again.  I was one of the last of the faithful; I
+carried devotion so far as to sit to him for my head.  If you could have
+seen the horrible creature he made of me, you would admit that even a
+woman with no more vanity than will tie her bonnet straight must have
+cooled off then.  The man didn't know the very alphabet of drawing!  His
+strong point, he intimated, was his sentiment; but is it a consolation,
+when one has been painted a fright, to know it has been done with
+peculiar gusto?  One by one, I confess, we fell away from the faith, and
+Mr. Theobald didn't lift his little finger to preserve us.  At the first
+hint that we were tired of waiting, and that we should like the show to
+begin, he was off in a huff.  'Great work requires time, contemplation,
+privacy, mystery!  O ye of little faith!'  We answered that we didn't
+insist on a great work; that the five-act tragedy might come at his
+convenience; that we merely asked for something to keep us from yawning,
+some inexpensive little _lever de rideau_.  Hereupon the poor man took
+his stand as a genius misconceived and persecuted, an _ame meconnue_, and
+washed his hands of us from that hour!  No, I believe he does me the
+honour to consider me the head and front of the conspiracy formed to nip
+his glory in the bud--a bud that has taken twenty years to blossom.  Ask
+him if he knows me, and he will tell you I am a horribly ugly old woman,
+who has vowed his destruction because he won't paint her portrait as a
+pendant to Titian's Flora.  I fancy that since then he has had none but
+chance followers, innocent strangers like yourself, who have taken him at
+his word.  The mountain is still in labour; I have not heard that the
+mouse has been born.  I pass him once in a while in the galleries, and he
+fixes his great dark eyes on me with a sublimity of indifference, as if I
+were a bad copy of a Sassoferrato!  It is a long time ago now that I
+heard that he was making studies for a Madonna who was to be a _resume_
+of all the other Madonnas of the Italian school--like that antique Venus
+who borrowed a nose from one great image and an ankle from another.  It's
+certainly a masterly idea.  The parts may be fine, but when I think of my
+unhappy portrait I tremble for the whole.  He has communicated this
+striking idea under the pledge of solemn secrecy to fifty chosen spirits,
+to every one he has ever been able to button-hole for five minutes.  I
+suppose he wants to get an order for it, and he is not to blame; for
+Heaven knows how he lives.  I see by your blush," my hostess frankly
+continued, "that you have been honoured with his confidence.  You needn't
+be ashamed, my dear young man; a man of your age is none the worse for a
+certain generous credulity.  Only allow me to give you a word of advice:
+keep your credulity out of your pockets!  Don't pay for the picture till
+it's delivered.  You have not been treated to a peep at it, I imagine!  No
+more have your fifty predecessors in the faith.  There are people who
+doubt whether there is any picture to be seen.  I fancy, myself, that if
+one were to get into his studio, one would find something very like the
+picture in that tale of Balzac's--a mere mass of incoherent scratches and
+daubs, a jumble of dead paint!"
+
+I listened to this pungent recital in silent wonder.  It had a painfully
+plausible sound, and was not inconsistent with certain shy suspicions of
+my own.  My hostess was not only a clever woman, but presumably a
+generous one.  I determined to let my judgment wait upon events.  Possibly
+she was right; but if she was wrong, she was cruelly wrong!  Her version
+of my friend's eccentricities made me impatient to see him again and
+examine him in the light of public opinion.  On our next meeting I
+immediately asked him if he knew Mrs. Coventry.  He laid his hand on my
+arm and gave me a sad smile.  "Has she taxed _your_ gallantry at last?"
+he asked.  "She's a foolish woman.  She's frivolous and heartless, and
+she pretends to be serious and kind.  She prattles about Giotto's second
+manner and Vittoria Colonna's liaison with 'Michael'--one would think
+that Michael lived across the way and was expected in to take a hand at
+whist--but she knows as little about art, and about the conditions of
+production, as I know about Buddhism.  She profanes sacred words," he
+added more vehemently, after a pause.  "She cares for you only as some
+one to band teacups in that horrible mendacious little parlour of hers,
+with its trumpery Peruginos!  If you can't dash off a new picture every
+three days, and let her hand it round among her guests, she tells them in
+plain English that you are an impostor!"
+
+This attempt of mine to test Mrs. Coventry's accuracy was made in the
+course of a late afternoon walk to the quiet old church of San Miniato,
+on one of the hill-tops which directly overlook the city, from whose
+gates you are guided to it by a stony and cypress-bordered walk, which
+seems a very fitting avenue to a shrine.  No spot is more propitious to
+lingering repose than the broad terrace in front of the church, where,
+lounging against the parapet, you may glance in slow alternation from the
+black and yellow marbles of the church facade, seamed and cracked with
+time and wind-sown with a tender flora of its own, down to the full domes
+and slender towers of Florence and over to the blue sweep of the wide-
+mouthed cup of mountains into whose hollow the little treasure city has
+been dropped.  I had proposed, as a diversion from the painful memories
+evoked by Mrs. Coventry's name, that Theobald should go with me the next
+evening to the opera, where some rarely-played work was to be given.  He
+declined, as I half expected, for I observed that he regularly kept his
+evenings in reserve, and never alluded to his manner of passing them.
+"You have reminded me before," I said, smiling, "of that charming speech
+of the Florentine painter in Alfred de Musset's 'Lorenzaccio': 'I do no
+harm to anyone.  I pass my days in my studio, On Sunday I go to the
+Annunziata or to Santa Mario; the monks think I have a voice; they dress
+me in a white gown and a red cap, and I take a share in the choruses;
+sometimes I do a little solo: these are the only times I go into public.
+In the evening, I visit my sweetheart; when the night is fine, we pass it
+on her balcony.'  I don't know whether you have a sweetheart, or whether
+she has a balcony.  But if you are so happy, it's certainly better than
+trying to find a charm in a third-rate prima donna."
+
+He made no immediate response, but at last he turned to me solemnly.  "Can
+you look upon a beautiful woman with reverent eyes?"
+
+"Really," I said, "I don't pretend to be sheepish, but I should be sorry
+to think I was impudent."  And I asked him what in the world he meant.
+When at last I had assured him that I could undertake to temper
+admiration with respect, he informed me, with an air of religious
+mystery, that it was in his power to introduce me to the most beautiful
+woman in Italy--"A beauty with a soul!"
+
+"Upon my word," I cried, "you are extremely fortunate, and that is a most
+attractive description."
+
+"This woman's beauty," he went on, "is a lesson, a morality, a poem!  It's
+my daily study."
+
+Of course, after this, I lost no time in reminding him of what, before we
+parted, had taken the shape of a promise.  "I feel somehow," he had said,
+"as if it were a sort of violation of that privacy in which I have always
+contemplated her beauty.  This is friendship, my friend.  No hint of her
+existence has ever fallen from my lips.  But with too great a familiarity
+we are apt to lose a sense of the real value of things, and you perhaps
+will throw some new light upon it and offer a fresher interpretation."
+
+We went accordingly by appointment to a certain ancient house in the
+heart of Florence--the precinct of the Mercato Vecchio--and climbed a
+dark, steep staircase, to the very summit of the edifice.  Theobald's
+beauty seemed as loftily exalted above the line of common vision as his
+artistic ideal was lifted above the usual practice of men.  He passed
+without knocking into the dark vestibule of a small apartment, and,
+flinging open an inner door, ushered me into a small saloon.  The room
+seemed mean and sombre, though I caught a glimpse of white curtains
+swaying gently at an open window.  At a table, near a lamp, sat a woman
+dressed in black, working at a piece of embroidery.  As Theobald entered
+she looked up calmly, with a smile; but seeing me she made a movement of
+surprise, and rose with a kind of stately grace.  Theobald stepped
+forward, took her hand and kissed it, with an indescribable air of
+immemorial usage.  As he bent his head she looked at me askance, and I
+thought she blushed.
+
+"Behold the Serafina!" said Theobald, frankly, waving me forward.  "This
+is a friend, and a lover of the arts," he added, introducing me.  I
+received a smile, a curtsey, and a request to be seated.
+
+The most beautiful woman in Italy was a person of a generous Italian type
+and of a great simplicity of demeanour.  Seated again at her lamp, with
+her embroidery, she seemed to have nothing whatever to say.  Theobald,
+bending towards her in a sort of Platonic ecstasy, asked her a dozen
+paternally tender questions as to her health, her state of mind, her
+occupations, and the progress of her embroidery, which he examined
+minutely and summoned me to admire.  It was some portion of an
+ecclesiastical vestment--yellow satin wrought with an elaborate design of
+silver and gold.  She made answer in a full rich voice, but with a
+brevity which I hesitated whether to attribute to native reserve or to
+the profane constraint of my presence.  She had been that morning to
+confession; she had also been to market, and had bought a chicken for
+dinner.  She felt very happy; she had nothing to complain of except that
+the people for whom she was making her vestment, and who furnished her
+materials, should be willing to put such rotten silver thread into the
+garment, as one might say, of the Lord.  From time to time, as she took
+her slow stitches, she raised her eyes and covered me with a glance which
+seemed at first to denote a placid curiosity, but in which, as I saw it
+repeated, I thought I perceived the dim glimmer of an attempt to
+establish an understanding with me at the expense of our companion.
+Meanwhile, as mindful as possible of Theobald's injunction of reverence,
+I considered the lady's personal claims to the fine compliment he had
+paid her.
+
+That she was indeed a beautiful woman I perceived, after recovering from
+the surprise of finding her without the freshness of youth.  Her beauty
+was of a sort which, in losing youth, loses little of its essential
+charm, expressed for the most part as it was in form and structure, and,
+as Theobald would have said, in "composition."  She was broad and ample,
+low-browed and large-eyed, dark and pale.  Her thick brown hair hung low
+beside her cheek and ear, and seemed to drape her head with a covering as
+chaste and formal as the veil of a nun.  The poise and carriage of her
+head were admirably free and noble, and they were the more effective that
+their freedom was at moments discreetly corrected by a little
+sanctimonious droop, which harmonised admirably with the level gaze of
+her dark and quiet eye.  A strong, serene, physical nature, and the
+placid temper which comes of no nerves and no troubles, seemed this
+lady's comfortable portion.  She was dressed in plain dull black, save
+for a sort of dark blue kerchief which was folded across her bosom and
+exposed a glimpse of her massive throat.  Over this kerchief was
+suspended a little silver cross.  I admired her greatly, and yet with a
+large reserve.  A certain mild intellectual apathy belonged properly to
+her type of beauty, and had always seemed to round and enrich it; but
+this _bourgeoise_ Egeria, if I viewed her right, betrayed a rather vulgar
+stagnation of mind.  There might have been once a dim spiritual light in
+her face; but it had long since begun to wane.  And furthermore, in plain
+prose, she was growing stout.  My disappointment amounted very nearly to
+complete disenchantment when Theobald, as if to facilitate my covert
+inspection, declaring that the lamp was very dim, and that she would ruin
+her eyes without more light, rose and fetched a couple of candles from
+the mantelpiece, which he placed lighted on the table.  In this brighter
+illumination I perceived that our hostess was decidedly an elderly woman.
+She was neither haggard, nor worn, nor gray; she was simply coarse.  The
+"soul" which Theobald had promised seemed scarcely worth making such a
+point of; it was no deeper mystery than a sort of matronly mildness of
+lip and brow.  I should have been ready even to declare that that
+sanctified bend of the head was nothing more than the trick of a person
+constantly working at embroidery.  It occurred to me even that it was a
+trick of a less innocent sort; for, in spite of the mellow quietude of
+her wits, this stately needlewoman dropped a hint that she took the
+situation rather less seriously than her friend.  When he rose to light
+the candles she looked across at me with a quick, intelligent smile, and
+tapped her forehead with her forefinger; then, as from a sudden feeling
+of compassionate loyalty to poor Theobald, I preserved a blank face, she
+gave a little shrug and resumed her work.
+
+What was the relation of this singular couple?  Was he the most ardent of
+friends or the most reverent of lovers?  Did she regard him as an
+eccentric swain, whose benevolent admiration of her beauty she was not
+ill pleased to humour at this small cost of having him climb into her
+little parlour and gossip of summer nights?  With her decent and sombre
+dress, her simple gravity, and that fine piece of priestly needlework,
+she looked like some pious lay-member of a sisterhood, living by special
+permission outside her convent walls.  Or was she maintained here aloft
+by her friend in comfortable leisure, so that he might have before him
+the perfect, eternal type, uncorrupted and untarnished by the struggle
+for existence?  Her shapely hands, I observed, wore very fair and white;
+they lacked the traces of what is called honest toil.
+
+"And the pictures, how do they come on?" she asked of Theobald, after a
+long pause.
+
+"Finely, finely!  I have here a friend whose sympathy and encouragement
+give me new faith and ardour."
+
+Our hostess turned to me, gazed at me a moment rather inscrutably, and
+then tapping her forehead with the gesture she had used a minute before,
+"He has a magnificent genius!" she said, with perfect gravity.
+
+"I am inclined to think so," I answered, with a smile.
+
+"Eh, why do you smile?" she cried.  "If you doubt it, you must see the
+_bambino_!"  And she took the lamp and conducted me to the other side of
+the room, where on the wall, in a plain black frame, hung a large drawing
+in red chalk.  Beneath it was fastened a little howl for holy water.  The
+drawing represented a very young child, entirely naked, half nestling
+back against his mother's gown, but with his two little arms
+outstretched, as if in the act of benediction.  It was executed with
+singular freedom and power, and yet seemed vivid with the sacred bloom of
+infancy.  A sort of dimpled elegance and grace, mingled with its
+boldness, recalled the touch of Correggio.  "That's what he can do!" said
+my hostess.  "It's the blessed little boy whom I lost.  It's his very
+image, and the Signor Teobaldo gave it me as a gift.  He has given me
+many things besides!"
+
+I looked at the picture for some time and admired it immensely.  Turning
+back to Theobald I assured him that if it were hung among the drawings in
+the Uffizi and labelled with a glorious name it would hold its own.  My
+praise seemed to give him extreme pleasure; he pressed my hands, and his
+eyes filled with tears.  It moved him apparently with the desire to
+expatiate on the history of the drawing, for he rose and made his adieux
+to our companion, kissing her band with the same mild ardour as before.
+It occurred to me that the offer of a similar piece of gallantry on my
+own part might help me to know what manner of woman she was.  When she
+perceived my intention she withdrew her hand, dropped her eyes solemnly,
+and made me a severe curtsey.  Theobald took my arm and led me rapidly
+into the street.
+
+"And what do you think of the divine Serafina?" he cried with fervour.
+
+"It is certainly an excellent style of good looks!" I answered.
+
+He eyed me an instant askance, and then seemed hurried along by the
+current of remembrance.  "You should have seen the mother and the child
+together, seen them as I first saw them--the mother with her head draped
+in a shawl, a divine trouble in her face, and the bambino pressed to her
+bosom.  You would have said, I think, that Raphael had found his match in
+common chance.  I was coming in, one summer night, from a long walk in
+the country, when I met this apparition at the city gate.  The woman held
+out her hand.  I hardly knew whether to say, 'What do you want?' or to
+fall down and worship.  She asked for a little money.  I saw that she was
+beautiful and pale; she might have stepped out of the stable of
+Bethlehem!  I gave her money and helped her on her way into the town.  I
+had guessed her story.  She, too, was a maiden mother, and she had been
+turned out into the world in her shame.  I felt in all my pulses that
+here was my subject marvellously realised.  I felt like one of the old
+monkish artists who had had a vision.  I rescued the poor creatures,
+cherished them, watched them as I would have done some precious work of
+art, some lovely fragment of fresco discovered in a mouldering cloister.
+In a month--as if to deepen and sanctify the sadness and sweetness of it
+all--the poor little child died.  When she felt that he was going she
+held him up to me for ten minutes, and I made that sketch.  You saw a
+feverish haste in it, I suppose; I wanted to spare the poor little mortal
+the pain of his position.  After that I doubly valued the mother.  She is
+the simplest, sweetest, most natural creature that ever bloomed in this
+brave old land of Italy.  She lives in the memory of her child, in her
+gratitude for the scanty kindness I have been able to show her, and in
+her simple religion!  She is not even conscious of her beauty; my
+admiration has never made her vain.  Heaven knows that I have made no
+secret of it.  You must have observed the singular transparency of her
+expression, the lovely modesty of her glance.  And was there ever such a
+truly virginal brow, such a natural classic elegance in the wave of the
+hair and the arch of the forehead?  I have studied her; I may say I know
+her.  I have absorbed her little by little; my mind is stamped and
+imbued, and I have determined now to clinch the impression; I shall at
+last invite her to sit for me!"
+
+"'At last--at last'?" I repeated, in much amazement.  "Do you mean that
+she has never done so yet?"
+
+"I have not really had--a--a sitting," said Theobald, speaking very
+slowly.  "I have taken notes, you know; I have got my grand fundamental
+impression.  That's the great thing!  But I have not actually had her as
+a model, posed and draped and lighted, before my easel."
+
+What had become for the moment of my perception and my tact I am at a
+loss to say; in their absence I was unable to repress a headlong
+exclamation.  I was destined to regret it.  We had stopped at a turning,
+beneath a lamp.  "My poor friend," I exclaimed, laying my hand on his
+shoulder, "you have _dawdled_!  She's an old, old woman--for a Madonna!"
+
+It was as if I had brutally struck him; I shall never forget the long,
+slow, almost ghastly look of pain, with which he answered me.
+
+"Dawdled?--old, old?" he stammered.  "Are you joking?"
+
+"Why, my dear fellow, I suppose you don't take her for a woman of
+twenty?"
+
+He drew a long breath and leaned against a house, looking at me with
+questioning, protesting, reproachful eyes.  At last, starting forward,
+and grasping my arm--"Answer me solemnly: does she seem to you truly old?
+Is she wrinkled, is she faded, am I blind?"
+
+Then at last I understood the immensity of his illusion how, one by one,
+the noiseless years had ebbed away and left him brooding in charmed
+inaction, for ever preparing for a work for ever deferred.  It seemed to
+me almost a kindness now to tell him the plain truth.  "I should be sorry
+to say you are blind," I answered, "but I think you are deceived.  You
+have lost time in effortless contemplation.  Your friend was once young
+and fresh and virginal; but, I protest, that was some years ago.  Still,
+she has _de beaux restes_.  By all means make her sit for you!" I broke
+down; his face was too horribly reproachful.
+
+He took off his hat and stood passing his handkerchief mechanically over
+his forehead.  "_De beaux restes_?  I thank you for sparing me the plain
+English.  I must make up my Madonna out of _de beaux restes_!  What a
+masterpiece she will be!  Old--old!  Old--old!" he murmured.
+
+"Never mind her age," I cried, revolted at what I had done, "never mind
+my impression of her!  You have your memory, your notes, your genius.
+Finish your picture in a month.  I pronounce it beforehand a masterpiece,
+and I hereby offer you for it any sum you may choose to ask."
+
+He stared, but he seemed scarcely to understand me.  "Old--old!" he kept
+stupidly repeating.  "If she is old, what am I?  If her beauty has faded,
+where--where is my strength?  Has life been a dream?  Have I worshipped
+too long--have I loved too well?"  The charm, in truth, was broken.  That
+the chord of illusion should have snapped at my light accidental touch
+showed how it had been weakened by excessive tension.  The poor fellow's
+sense of wasted time, of vanished opportunity, seemed to roll in upon his
+soul in waves of darkness.  He suddenly dropped his head and burst into
+tears.
+
+I led him homeward with all possible tenderness, but I attempted neither
+to check his grief, to restore his equanimity, nor to unsay the hard
+truth.  When we reached my hotel I tried to induce him to come so.
+
+"We will drink a glass of wine," I said, smiling, "to the completion of
+the Madonna."
+
+With a violent effort he held up his head, mused for a moment with a
+formidably sombre frown, and then giving me his hand, "I will finish it,"
+he cried, "in a month!  No, in a fortnight!  After all, I have it
+_here_!"  And he tapped his forehead.  "Of course she's old!  She can
+afford to have it said of her--a woman who has made twenty years pass
+like a twelvemonth!  Old--old!  Why, sir, she shall be eternal!"
+
+I wished to see him safely to his own door, but he waved me back and
+walked away with an air of resolution, whistling and swinging his cane.  I
+waited a moment, and then followed him at a distance, and saw him proceed
+to cross the Santa Trinita Bridge.  When he reached the middle he
+suddenly paused, as if his strength had deserted him, and leaned upon the
+parapet gazing over into the river.  I was careful to keep him in sight;
+I confess that I passed ten very nervous minutes.  He recovered himself
+at last, and went his way, slowly and with hanging head.
+
+That I had really startled poor Theobald into a bolder use of his long-
+garnered stores of knowledge and taste, into the vulgar effort and hazard
+of production, seemed at first reason enough for his continued silence
+and absence; but as day followed day without his either calling or
+sending me a line, and without my meeting him in his customary haunts, in
+the galleries, in the Chapel at San Lorenzo, or strolling between the
+Arno side and the great hedge-screen of verdure which, along the drive of
+the Cascine, throws the fair occupants of barouche and phaeton into such
+becoming relief--as for more than a week I got neither tidings nor sight
+of him, I began to fear that I had fatally offended him, and that,
+instead of giving a wholesome impetus to his talent, I had brutally
+paralysed it.  I had a wretched suspicion that I had made him ill.  My
+stay at Florence was drawing to a close, and it was important that,
+before resuming my journey, I should assure myself of the truth.
+Theobald, to the last, had kept his lodging a mystery, and I was
+altogether at a loss where to look for him.  The simplest course was to
+make inquiry of the beauty of the Mercato Vecchio, and I confess that
+unsatisfied curiosity as to the lady herself counselled it as well.
+Perhaps I had done her injustice, and she was as immortally fresh and
+fair as be conceived her.  I was, at any rate, anxious to behold once
+more the ripe enchantress who had made twenty years pass as a
+twelvemonth.  I repaired accordingly, one morning, to her abode, climbed
+the interminable staircase, and reached her door.  It stood ajar, and as
+I hesitated whether to enter, a little serving-maid came clattering out
+with an empty kettle, as if she had just performed some savoury errand.
+The inner door, too, was open; so I crossed the little vestibule and
+entered the room in which I had formerly been received.  It had not its
+evening aspect.  The table, or one end of it, was spread for a late
+breakfast, and before it sat a gentleman--an individual, at least, of the
+male sex--doing execution upon a beefsteak and onions, and a bottle of
+wine.  At his elbow, in friendly proximity, was placed the lady of the
+house.  Her attitude, as I entered, was not that of an enchantress.  With
+one hand she held in her lap a plate of smoking maccaroni; with the other
+she had lifted high in air one of the pendulous filaments of this
+succulent compound, and was in the act of slipping it gently down her
+throat.  On the uncovered end of the table, facing her companion, were
+ranged half a dozen small statuettes, of some snuff-coloured substance
+resembling terra-cotta.  He, brandishing his knife with ardour, was
+apparently descanting on their merits.
+
+Evidently I darkened the door.  My hostess dropped liner maccaroni--into
+her mouth, and rose hastily with a harsh exclamation and a flushed face.
+I immediately perceived that the Signora Serafina's secret was even
+better worth knowing than I had supposed, and that the way to learn it
+was to take it for granted.  I summoned my best Italian, I smiled and
+bowed and apologised for my intrusion; and in a moment, whether or no I
+had dispelled the lady's irritation, I had at least stimulated her
+prudence.  I was welcome, she said; I must take a seat.  This was another
+friend of hers--also an artist, she declared with a smile which was
+almost amiable.  Her companion wiped his moustache and bowed with great
+civility.  I saw at a glance that he was equal to the situation.  He was
+presumably the author of the statuettes on the table, and he knew a money-
+spending _forestiere_ when he saw one.  He was a small wiry man, with a
+clever, impudent, tossed-up nose, a sharp little black eye, and waxed
+ends to his moustache.  On the side of his head he wore jauntily a little
+crimson velvet smoking-cap, and I observed that his feet were encased in
+brilliant slippers.  On Serafina's remarking with dignity that I was the
+friend of Mr. Theobald, he broke out into that fantastic French of which
+certain Italians are so insistently lavish, and declared with fervour
+that Mr. Theobald was a magnificent genius.
+
+"I am sure I don't know," I answered with a shrug.  "If you are in a
+position to affirm it, you have the advantage of me.  I have seen nothing
+from his hand but the bambino yonder, which certainly is fine."
+
+He declared that the bambino was a masterpiece, a pure Corregio.  It was
+only a pity, he added with a knowing laugh, that the sketch had not been
+made on some good bit of honeycombed old panel.  The stately Serafina
+hereupon protested that Mr. Theobald was the soul of honour, and that he
+would never lend himself to a deceit.  "I am not a judge of genius," she
+said, "and I know nothing of pictures.  I am but a poor simple widow; but
+I know that the Signor Teobaldo has the heart of an angel and the virtue
+of a saint.  He is my benefactor," she added sententiously.  The after-
+glow of the somewhat sinister flush with which she had greeted me still
+lingered in her cheek, and perhaps did not favour her beauty; I could not
+but fancy it a wise custom of Theobald's to visit her only by
+candle-light.  She was coarse, and her pour adorer was a poet.
+
+"I have the greatest esteem for him," I said; "it is for this reason that
+I have been uneasy at not seeing him for ten days.  Have you seen him?  Is
+he perhaps ill?"
+
+"Ill!  Heaven forbid!" cried Serafina, with genuine vehemence.
+
+Her companion uttered a rapid expletive, and reproached her with not
+having been to see him.  She hesitated a moment; then she simpered the
+least bit and bridled.  "He comes to see me--without reproach!  But it
+would not be the same for me to go to him, though, indeed, you may almost
+call him a man of holy life."
+
+"He has the greatest admiration for you," I said.  "He would have been
+honoured by your visit."
+
+She looked at me a moment sharply.  "More admiration than you.  Admit
+that!"  Of course I protested with all the eloquence at my command, and
+my mysterious hostess then confessed that she had taken no fancy to me on
+my former visit, and that, Theobald not having returned, she believed I
+had poisoned his mind against her.  "It would be no kindness to the poor
+gentleman, I can tell you that," she said.  "He has come to see me every
+evening for years.  It's a long friendship!  No one knows him as well as
+I."
+
+"I don't pretend to know him or to understand him," I said.  "He's a
+mystery!  Nevertheless, he seems to me a little--"  And I touched my
+forehead and waved my hand in the air.
+
+Serafina glanced at her companion a moment, as if for inspiration.  He
+contented himself with shrugging his shoulders as he filled his glass
+again.  The _padrona_ hereupon gave me a more softly insinuating smile
+than would have seemed likely to bloom on so candid a brow.  "It's for
+that that I love him!" she said.  "The world has so little kindness for
+such persons.  It laughs at them, and despises them, and cheats them.  He
+is too good for this wicked life!  It's his fancy that he finds a little
+Paradise up here in my poor apartment.  If he thinks so, how can I help
+it?  He has a strange belief--really, I ought to be ashamed to tell
+you--that I resemble the Blessed Virgin: Heaven forgive me!  I let him
+think what he pleases, so long as it makes him happy.  He was very kind
+to me once, and I am not one that forgets a favour.  So I receive him
+every evening civilly, and ask after his health, and let him look at me
+on this side and that!  For that matter, I may say it without vanity, I
+was worth looking at once!  And he's not always amusing, poor man!  He
+sits sometimes for an hour without speaking a word, or else he talks
+away, without stopping, on art and nature, and beauty and duty, and fifty
+fine things that are all so much Latin to me.  I beg you to understand
+that he has never said a word to me that I mightn't decently listen to.
+He may be a little cracked, but he's one of the blessed saints."
+
+"Eh!" cried the man, "the blessed saints were all a little cracked!"
+
+Serafina, I fancied, left part of her story untold; but she told enough
+of it to make poor Theobald's own statement seem intensely pathetic in
+its exalted simplicity.  "It's a strange fortune, certainly," she went
+on, "to have such a friend as this dear man--a friend who is less than a
+lover and more than a friend."  I glanced at her companion, who preserved
+an impenetrable smile, twisted the end of his moustache, and disposed of
+a copious mouthful.  Was _he_ less than a lover? "But what will you
+have?" Serafina pursued.  "In this hard world one must not ask too many
+questions; one must take what comes and keep what one gets.  I have kept
+my good friend for twenty years, and I do hope that, at this time of day,
+signore, you have not come to turn him against me!"
+
+I assured her that I had no such design, and that I should vastly regret
+disturbing Mr. Theobald's habits or convictions.  On the contrary, I was
+alarmed about him, and I should immediately go in search of him.  She
+gave me his address, and a florid account of her sufferings at his non-
+appearance.  She had not been to him for various reasons; chiefly because
+she was afraid of displeasing him, as he had always made such a mystery
+of his home.  "You might have sent this gentleman!" I ventured to
+suggest.
+
+"Ah," cried the gentleman, "he admires the Signora Serafina, but he
+wouldn't admire me."  And then, confidentially, with his finger on his
+nose, "He's a purist!"
+
+I was about to withdraw, after having promised that I would inform the
+Signora Serafina of my friend's condition, when her companion, who had
+risen from table and girded his loins apparently for the onset, grasped
+me gently by the arm, and led me before the row of statuettes.  "I
+perceive by your conversation, signore, that you are a patron of the
+arts.  Allow me to request your honourable attention for these modest
+products of my own ingenuity.  They are brand-new, fresh from my atelier,
+and have never been exhibited in public.  I have brought them here to
+receive the verdict of this dear lady, who is a good critic, for all she
+may pretend to the contrary.  I am the inventor of this peculiar style of
+statuette--of subject, manner, material, everything.  Touch them, I pray
+you; handle them freely--you needn't fear.  Delicate as they look, it is
+impossible they should break!  My various creations have met with great
+success.  They are especially admired by Americans.  I have sent them all
+over Europe--to London, Paris, Vienna!  You may have observed some little
+specimens in Paris, on the Boulevard, in a shop of which they constitute
+the specialty.  There is always a crowd about the window.  They form a
+very pleasing ornament for the mantel-shelf of a gay young bachelor, for
+the boudoir of a pretty woman.  You couldn't make a prettier present to a
+person with whom you wished to exchange a harmless joke.  It is not
+classic art, signore, of course; but, between ourselves, isn't classic
+art sometimes rather a bore?  Caricature, burlesque, _la charge_, as the
+French say, has hitherto been confined to paper, to the pen and pencil.
+Now, it has been my inspiration to introduce it into statuary.  For this
+purpose I have invented a peculiar plastic compound which you will permit
+me not to divulge.  That's my secret, signore!  It's as light, you
+perceive, as cork, and yet as firm as alabaster!  I frankly confess that
+I really pride myself as much on this little stroke of chemical ingenuity
+as upon the other element of novelty in my creations--my types.  What do
+you say to my types, signore?  The idea is bold; does it strike you as
+happy?  Cats and monkeys--monkeys and cats--all human life is there!
+Human life, of course, I mean, viewed with the eye of the satirist!  To
+combine sculpture and satire, signore, has been my unprecedented
+ambition.  I flatter myself that I have not egregiously failed."
+
+As this jaunty Juvenal of the chimney-piece delivered himself of his
+persuasive allocution, he took up his little groups successively from the
+table, held them aloft, turned them about, rapped them with his knuckles,
+and gazed at them lovingly, with his head on one side.  They consisted
+each of a cat and a monkey, fantastically draped, in some preposterously
+sentimental conjunction.  They exhibited a certain sameness of motive,
+and illustrated chiefly the different phases of what, in delicate terms,
+may be called gallantry and coquetry; but they were strikingly clever and
+expressive, and were at once very perfect cats and monkeys and very
+natural men and women.  I confess, however, that they failed to amuse me.
+I was doubtless not in a mood to enjoy them, for they seemed to me
+peculiarly cynical and vulgar.  Their imitative felicity was revolting.
+As I looked askance at the complacent little artist, brandishing them
+between finger and thumb and caressing them with an amorous eye, he
+seemed to me himself little more than an exceptionally intelligent ape.  I
+mustered an admiring grin, however, and he blew another blast.  "My
+figures are studied from life!  I have a little menagerie of monkeys
+whose frolics I contemplate by the hour.  As for the cats, one has only
+to look out of one's back window!  Since I have begun to examine these
+expressive little brutes, I have made many profound observations.
+Speaking, signore, to a man of imagination, I may say that my little
+designs are not without a philosophy of their own.  Truly, I don't know
+whether the cats and monkeys imitate us, or whether it's we who imitate
+them."  I congratulated him on his philosophy, and he resumed: "You will
+do use the honour to admit that I have handled my subjects with delicacy.
+Eh, it was needed, signore!  I have been free, but not too free--eh?  Just
+a hint, you know!  You may see as much or as little as you please.  These
+little groups, however, are no measure of my invention.  If you will
+favour me with a call at my studio, I think that you will admit that my
+combinations are really infinite.  I likewise execute figures to command.
+You have perhaps some little motive--the fruit of your philosophy of
+life, signore--which you would like to have interpreted.  I can promise
+to work it up to your satisfaction; it shall be as malicious as you
+please!  Allow me to present you with my card, and to remind you that my
+prices are moderate.  Only sixty francs for a little group like that.  My
+statuettes are as durable as bronze--_aere perennius_, signore--and,
+between ourselves, I think they are more amusing!"
+
+As I pocketed his card I glanced at Madonna Serafina, wondering whether
+she had an eye for contrasts.  She had picked up one of the little
+couples and was tenderly dusting it with a feather broom.
+
+What I had just seen and heard had so deepened my compassionate interest
+in my deluded friend that I took a summary leave, making my way directly
+to the house designated by this remarkable woman.  It was in an obscure
+corner of the opposite side of the town, and presented a sombre and
+squalid appearance.  An old woman in the doorway, on my inquiring for
+Theobald, ushered me in with a mumbled blessing and an expression of
+relief at the poor gentleman having a friend.  His lodging seemed to
+consist of a single room at the top of the house.  On getting no answer
+to my knock, I opened the door, supposing that he was absent, so that it
+gave me a certain shock to find him sitting there helpless and dumb.  He
+was seated near the single window, facing an easel which supported a
+large canvas.  On my entering he looked up at me blankly, without
+changing his position, which was that of absolute lassitude and
+dejection, his arms loosely folded, his legs stretched before him, his
+head hanging on his breast.  Advancing into the room I perceived that his
+face vividly corresponded with his attitude.  He was pale, haggard, and
+unshaven, and his dull and sunken eye gazed at me without a spark of
+recognition.  I had been afraid that he would greet me with fierce
+reproaches, as the cruelly officious patron who had turned his
+contentment to bitterness, and I was relieved to find that my appearance
+awakened no visible resentment.  "Don't you know me?" I asked, as I put
+out my hand.  "Have you already forgotten me?"
+
+He made no response, kept his position stupidly, and left me staring
+about the room.  It spoke most plaintively for itself.  Shabby, sordid,
+naked, it contained, beyond the wretched bed, but the scantiest provision
+for personal comfort.  It was bedroom at once and studio--a grim ghost of
+a studio.  A few dusty casts and prints on the walls, three or four old
+canvases turned face inward, and a rusty-looking colour-box, formed, with
+the easel at the window, the sum of its appurtenances.  The place
+savoured horribly of poverty.  Its only wealth was the picture on the
+easel, presumably the famous Madonna.  Averted as this was from the door,
+I was unable to see its face; but at last, sickened by the vacant misery
+of the spot, I passed behind Theobald, eagerly and tenderly.  I can
+hardly say that I was surprised at what I found--a canvas that was a mere
+dead blank, cracked and discoloured by time.  This was his immortal work!
+Though not surprised, I confess I was powerfully moved, and I think that
+for five minutes I could not have trusted myself to speak.  At last my
+silent nearness affected him; he stirred and turned, and then rose and
+looked at me with a slowly kindling eye.  I murmured some kind
+ineffective nothings about his being ill and needing advice and care, but
+he seemed absorbed in the effort to recall distinctly what had last
+passed between us.  "You were right," he said, with a pitiful smile, "I
+am a dawdler!  I am a failure!  I shall do nothing more in this world.
+You opened my eyes; and, though the truth is bitter, I bear you no
+grudge.  Amen!  I have been sitting here for a week, face to face with
+the truth, with the past, with my weakness and poverty and nullity.  I
+shall never touch a brush!  I believe I have neither eaten nor slept.
+Look at that canvas!" he went on, as I relieved my emotion in an urgent
+request that he would come home with me and dine.  "That was to have
+contained my masterpiece!  Isn't it a promising foundation?  The elements
+of it are all _here_."  And he tapped his forehead with that mystic
+confidence which had marked the gesture before.  "If I could only
+transpose them into some brain that has the hand, the will!  Since I have
+been sitting here taking stock of my intellects, I have come to believe
+that I have the material for a hundred masterpieces.  But my hand is
+paralysed now, and they will never be painted.  I never began!  I waited
+and waited to be worthier to begin, and wasted my life in preparation.
+While I fancied my creation was growing it was dying.  I have taken it
+all too hard!  Michael Angelo didn't, when he went at the Lorenzo!  He
+did his best at a venture, and his venture is immortal.  _That's_ mine!"
+And he pointed with a gesture I shall never forget at the empty canvas.
+"I suppose we are a genus by ourselves in the providential scheme--we
+talents that can't act, that can't do nor dare!  We take it out in talk,
+in plans and promises, in study, in visions!  But our visions, let me
+tell you," he cried, with a toss of his head, "have a way of being
+brilliant, and a man has not lived in vain who has seen the things I have
+seen!  Of course you will not believe in them when that bit of worm-eaten
+cloth is all I have to show for them; but to convince you, to enchant and
+astound the world, I need only the hand of Raphael.  His brain I already
+have.  A pity, you will say, that I haven't his modesty!  Ah, let me
+boast and babble now; it's all I have left!  I am the half of a genius!
+Where in the wide world is my other half?  Lodged perhaps in the vulgar
+soul, the cunning, ready fingers of some dull copyist or some trivial
+artisan, who turns out by the dozen his easy prodigies of touch!  But
+it's not for me to sneer at him; he at least does something.  He's not a
+dawdler!  Well for me if I had been vulgar and clever and reckless, if I
+could have shut my eyes and taken my leap."
+
+What to say to the poor fellow, what to do for him, seemed hard to
+determine; I chiefly felt that I must break the spell of his present
+inaction, and remove him from the haunted atmosphere of the little room
+it was such a cruel irony to call a studio.  I cannot say I persuaded him
+to come out with me; he simply suffered himself to be led, and when we
+began to walk in the open air I was able to appreciate his pitifully
+weakened condition.  Nevertheless, he seemed in a certain way to revive,
+and murmured at last that he should like to go to the Pitti Gallery.  I
+shall never forget our melancholy stroll through those gorgeous halls,
+every picture on whose walls seemed, even to my own sympathetic vision,
+to glow with a sort of insolent renewal of strength and lustre.  The eyes
+and lips of the great portraits appeared to smile in ineffable scorn of
+the dejected pretender who had dreamed of competing with their triumphant
+authors; the celestial candour, even, of the Madonna of the Chair, as we
+paused in perfect silence before her, was tinged with the sinister irony
+of the women of Leonardo.  Perfect silence, indeed, marked our whole
+progress--the silence of a deep farewell; for I felt in all my pulses, as
+Theobald, leaning on my arm, dragged one heavy foot after the other, that
+he was looking his last.  When we came out he was so exhausted that
+instead of taking him to my hotel to dine, I called a carriage and drove
+him straight to his own poor lodging.  He had sunk into an extraordinary
+lethargy; he lay back in the carriage, with his eyes closed, as pale as
+death, his faint breathing interrupted at intervals by a sudden gasp,
+like a smothered sob or a vain attempt to speak.  With the help of the
+old woman who had admitted me before, and who emerged from a dark back
+court, I contrived to lead him up the long steep staircase and lay him on
+his wretched bed.  To her I gave him in charge, while I prepared in all
+haste to seek a physician.  But she followed me out of the room with a
+pitiful clasping of her hands.
+
+"Poor, dear, blessed gentleman," she murmured; "is he dying?"
+
+"Possibly.  How long has he been thus?"
+
+"Since a certain night he passed ten days ago.  I came up in the morning
+to make his poor bed, and found him sitting up in his clothes before that
+great canvas he keeps there.  Poor, dear, strange man, he says his
+prayers to it!  He had not been to bed, nor since then, properly!  What
+has happened to him?  Has he found out about the Serafina?" she
+whispered, with a glittering eye and a toothless grin.
+
+"Prove at least that one old woman can be faithful," I said, "and watch
+him well till I come back."  My return was delayed, through the absence
+of the English physician, who was away on a round of visits, and whom I
+vainly pursued from house to house before I overtook him.  I brought him
+to Theobald's bedside none too soon.  A violent fever had seized our
+patient, and the case was evidently grave.  A couple of hours later I
+knew that he had brain fever.  From this moment I was with him
+constantly; but I am far from wishing to describe his illness.
+Excessively painful to witness, it was happily brief.  Life burned out in
+delirium.  One night in particular that I passed at his pillow, listening
+to his wild snatches of regret, of aspiration, of rapture and awe at the
+phantasmal pictures with which his brain seemed to swarm, comes back to
+my memory now like some stray page from a lost masterpiece of tragedy.
+Before a week was over we had buried him in the little Protestant
+cemetery on the way to Fiesole.  The Signora Serafina, whom I had caused
+to be informed of his illness, had come in person, I was told, to inquire
+about its progress; but she was absent from his funeral, which was
+attended by but a scanty concourse of mourners.  Half a dozen old
+Florentine sojourners, in spite of the prolonged estrangement which had
+preceded his death, had felt the kindly impulse to honour his grave.
+Among them was my friend Mrs. Coventry, whom I found, on my departure,
+waiting in her carriage at the gate of the cemetery.
+
+"Well," she said, relieving at last with a significant smile the
+solemnity of our immediate greeting, "and the great Madonna?  Have you
+seen her, after all?"
+
+"I have seen her," I said; "she is mine--by bequest.  But I shall never
+show her to you."
+
+"And why not, pray?"
+
+"My dear Mrs. Coventry, you would not understand her!"
+
+"Upon my word, you are polite."
+
+"Excuse me; I am sad and vexed and bitter."  And with reprehensible
+rudeness I marched away.  I was excessively impatient to leave Florence;
+my friend's dark spirit seemed diffused through all things.  I had packed
+my trunk to start for Rome that night, and meanwhile, to beguile my
+unrest, I aimlessly paced the streets.  Chance led me at last to the
+church of San Lorenzo.  Remembering poor Theobald's phrase about Michael
+Angelo--"He did his best at a venture"--I went in and turned my steps to
+the chapel of the tombs.  Viewing in sadness the sadness of its immortal
+treasures, I fancied, while I stood there, that they needed no ampler
+commentary than these simple words.  As I passed through the church again
+to leave it, a woman, turning away from one of the side altars, met me
+face to face.  The black shawl depending from her head draped
+picturesquely the handsome visage of Madonna Serafina.  She stopped as
+she recognised me, and I saw that she wished to speak.  Her eye was
+bright, and her ample bosom heaved in a way that seemed to portend a
+certain sharpness of reproach.  But the expression of my own face,
+apparently, drew the sting from her resentment, and she addressed me in a
+tone in which bitterness was tempered by a sort of dogged resignation.  "I
+know it was you, now, that separated us," she said.  "It was a pity he
+ever brought you to see me!  Of course, you couldn't think of me as he
+did.  Well, the Lord gave him, the Lord has taken him.  I have just paid
+for a nine days' mass for his soul.  And I can tell you this, signore--I
+never deceived him.  Who put it into his head that I was made to live on
+holy thoughts and fine phrases?  It was his own fancy, and it pleased him
+to think so.--Did he suffer much?" she added more softly, after a pause.
+
+"His sufferings were great, but they were short."
+
+"And did he speak of me?"  She had hesitated and dropped her eyes; she
+raised them with her question, and revealed in their sombre stillness a
+gleam of feminine confidence which, for the moment, revived and illumined
+her beauty.  Poor Theobald!  Whatever name he had given his passion, it
+was still her fine eyes that had charmed him.
+
+"Be contented, madam," I answered, gravely.
+
+She dropped her eyes again and was silent.  Then exhaling a full rich
+sigh, as she gathered her shawl together--"He was a magnificent genius!"
+
+I bowed, and we separated.
+
+Passing through a narrow side street on my way back to my hotel, I
+perceived above a doorway a sign which it seemed to me I had read before.
+I suddenly remembered that it was identical with the superscription of a
+card that I had carried for an hour in my waistcoat pocket.  On the
+threshold stood the ingenious artist whose claims to public favour were
+thus distinctly signalised, smoking a pipe in the evening air, and giving
+the finishing polish with a bit of rag to one of his inimitable
+"combinations."  I caught the expressive curl of a couple of tails.  He
+recognised me, removed his little red cap with a most obsequious bow, and
+motioned me to enter his studio.  I returned his salute and passed on,
+vexed with the apparition.  For a week afterwards, whenever I was seized
+among the ruins of triumphant Rome with some peculiarly poignant memory
+of Theobald's transcendent illusions and deplorable failure, I seemed to
+hear a fantastic, impertinent murmur, "Cats and monkeys, monkeys and
+cats; all human life there!"
+
+
+
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