Part 18 (1/2)
Roderick sat down, crossed his arms, and fixed his eyes on the floor.
Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he had never so clearly read his companion's strangely commingled character--his strength and his weakness, his picturesque personal attractiveness and his urgent egoism, his exalted ardor and his puerile petulance. It would have made him almost sick, however, to think that, on the whole, Roderick was not a generous fellow, and he was so far from having ceased to believe in him that he felt just now, more than ever, that all this was but the painful complexity of genius. Rowland, who had not a grain of genius either to make one say he was an interested reasoner, or to enable one to feel that he could afford a dangerous theory or two, adhered to his conviction of the essential salubrity of genius. Suddenly he felt an irresistible compa.s.sion for his companion; it seemed to him that his beautiful faculty of production was a double-edged instrument, susceptible of being dealt in back-handed blows at its possessor. Genius was priceless, inspired, divine; but it was also, at its hours, capricious, sinister, cruel; and men of genius, accordingly, were alternately very enviable and very helpless. It was not the first time he had had a sense of Roderick's standing helpless in the grasp of his temperament. It had shaken him, as yet, but with a half good-humored wantonness; but, henceforth, possibly, it meant to handle him more roughly. These were not times, therefore, for a friend to have a short patience.
”When you err, you say, the fault 's your own,” he said at last. ”It is because your faults are your own that I care about them.”
Rowland's voice, when he spoke with feeling, had an extraordinary amenity. Roderick sat staring a moment longer at the floor, then he sprang up and laid his hand affectionately on his friend's shoulder.
”You are the best man in the world,” he said, ”and I am a vile brute.
Only,” he added in a moment, ”you don't understand me!” And he looked at him with eyes of such radiant lucidity that one might have said (and Rowland did almost say so, himself) that it was the fault of one's own grossness if one failed to read to the bottom of that beautiful soul.
Rowland smiled sadly. ”What is it now? Explain.”
”Oh, I can't explain!” cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. ”I have only one way of expressing my deepest feelings--it 's this!” And he swung his tool. He stood looking at the half-wrought clay for a moment, and then flung the instrument down. ”And even this half the time plays me false!”
Rowland felt that his irritation had not subsided, and he himself had no taste for saying disagreeable things. Nevertheless he saw no sufficient reason to forbear uttering the words he had had on his conscience from the beginning. ”We must do what we can and be thankful,” he said. ”And let me a.s.sure you of this--that it won't help you to become entangled with Miss Light.”
Roderick pressed his hand to his forehead with vehemence and then shook it in the air, despairingly; a gesture that had become frequent with him since he had been in Italy. ”No, no, it 's no use; you don't understand me! But I don't blame you. You can't!”
”You think it will help you, then?” said Rowland, wondering.
”I think that when you expect a man to produce beautiful and wonderful works of art, you ought to allow him a certain freedom of action, you ought to give him a long rope, you ought to let him follow his fancy and look for his material wherever he thinks he may find it! A mother can't nurse her child unless she follows a certain diet; an artist can't bring his visions to maturity unless he has a certain experience. You demand of us to be imaginative, and you deny us that which feeds the imagination. In labor we must be as pa.s.sionate as the inspired sibyl; in life we must be mere machines. It won't do. When you have got an artist to deal with, you must take him as he is, good and bad together. I don't say they are pleasant fellows to know or easy fellows to live with; I don't say they satisfy themselves any better than other people. I only say that if you want them to produce, you must let them conceive. If you want a bird to sing, you must not cover up its cage. Shoot them, the poor devils, drown them, exterminate them, if you will, in the interest of public morality; it may be morality would gain--I dare say it would!
But if you suffer them to live, let them live on their own terms and according to their own inexorable needs!”
Rowland burst out laughing. ”I have no wish whatever either to shoot you or to drown you!” he said. ”Why launch such a tirade against a warning offered you altogether in the interest of your freest development?
Do you really mean that you have an inexorable need of embarking on a flirtation with Miss Light?--a flirtation as to the felicity of which there may be differences of opinion, but which cannot at best, under the circ.u.mstances, be called innocent. Your last summer's adventures were more so! As for the terms on which you are to live, I had an idea you had arranged them otherwise!”
”I have arranged nothing--thank G.o.d! I don't pretend to arrange. I am young and ardent and inquisitive, and I admire Miss Light. That 's enough. I shall go as far as admiration leads me. I am not afraid. Your genuine artist may be sometimes half a madman, but he 's not a coward!”
”Suppose that in your speculation you should come to grief, not only sentimentally but artistically?”
”Come what come will! If I 'm to fizzle out, the sooner I know it the better. Sometimes I half suspect it. But let me at least go out and reconnoitre for the enemy, and not sit here waiting for him, cudgeling my brains for ideas that won't come!”
Do what he would, Rowland could not think of Roderick's theory of unlimited experimentation, especially as applied in the case under discussion, as anything but a pernicious illusion. But he saw it was vain to combat longer, for inclination was powerfully on Roderick's side. He laid his hand on Roderick's shoulder, looked at him a moment with troubled eyes, then shook his head mournfully and turned away.
”I can't work any more,” said Roderick. ”You have upset me! I 'll go and stroll on the Pincian.” And he tossed aside his working-jacket and prepared himself for the street. As he was arranging his cravat before the gla.s.s, something occurred to him which made him thoughtful. He stopped a few moments afterward, as they were going out, with his hand on the door-k.n.o.b. ”You did, from your own point of view, an indiscreet thing,” he said, ”to tell Miss Light of my engagement.”
Rowland looked at him with a glance which was partly an interrogation, but partly, also, an admission.
”If she 's the coquette you say,” Roderick added, ”you have given her a reason the more.”
”And that 's the girl you propose to devote yourself to?” cried Rowland.
”Oh, I don't say it, mind! I only say that she 's the most interesting creature in the world! The next time you mean to render me a service, pray give me notice beforehand!”
It was perfectly characteristic of Roderick that, a fortnight later, he should have let his friend know that he depended upon him for society at Frascati, as freely as if no irritating topic had ever been discussed between them. Rowland thought him generous, and he had at any rate a liberal faculty of forgetting that he had given you any reason to be displeased with him. It was equally characteristic of Rowland that he complied with his friend's summons without a moment's hesitation. His cousin Cecilia had once told him that he was the dupe of his intense benevolence. She put the case with too little favor, or too much, as the reader chooses; it is certain, at least, that he had a const.i.tutional tendency towards magnanimous interpretations. Nothing happened, however, to suggest to him that he was deluded in thinking that Roderick's secondary impulses were wiser than his primary ones, and that the rounded total of his nature had a harmony perfectly attuned to the most amiable of its brilliant parts. Roderick's humor, for the time, was pitched in a minor key; he was lazy, listless, and melancholy, but he had never been more friendly and kindly and appealingly submissive.
Winter had begun, by the calendar, but the weather was divinely mild, and the two young men took long slow strolls on the hills and lounged away the mornings in the villas. The villas at Frascati are delicious places, and replete with romantic suggestiveness. Roderick, as he had said, was meditating, and if a masterpiece was to come of his meditations, Rowland was perfectly willing to bear him company and coax along the process. But Roderick let him know from the first that he was in a miserably sterile mood, and, cudgel his brains as he would, could think of nothing that would serve for the statue he was to make for Mr.
Leavenworth.
”It is worse out here than in Rome,” he said, ”for here I am face to face with the dead blank of my mind! There I could n't think of anything either, but there I found things to make me forget that I needed to.”
This was as frank an allusion to Christina Light as could have been expected under the circ.u.mstances; it seemed, indeed, to Rowland surprisingly frank, and a pregnant example of his companion's often strangely irresponsible way of looking at harmful facts. Roderick was silent sometimes for hours, with a puzzled look on his face and a constant fold between his even eyebrows; at other times he talked unceasingly, with a slow, idle, half-nonsensical drawl. Rowland was half a dozen times on the point of asking him what was the matter with him; he was afraid he was going to be ill. Roderick had taken a great fancy to the Villa Mondragone, and used to declaim fantastic compliments to it as they strolled in the winter suns.h.i.+ne on the great terrace which looks toward Tivoli and the iridescent Sabine mountains. He carried his volume of Ariosto in his pocket, and took it out every now and then and spouted half a dozen stanzas to his companion. He was, as a general thing, very little of a reader; but at intervals he would take a fancy to one of the cla.s.sics and peruse it for a month in disjointed sc.r.a.ps. He had picked up Italian without study, and had a wonderfully sympathetic accent, though in reading aloud he ruined the sense of half the lines he rolled off so sonorously. Rowland, who p.r.o.nounced badly but understood everything, once said to him that Ariosto was not the poet for a man of his craft; a sculptor should make a companion of Dante. So he lent him the Inferno, which he had brought with him, and advised him to look into it. Roderick took it with some eagerness; perhaps it would brighten his wits. He returned it the next day with disgust; he had found it intolerably depressing.
”A sculptor should model as Dante writes--you 're right there,” he said.
”But when his genius is in eclipse, Dante is a dreadfully smoky lamp.
By what perversity of fate,” he went on, ”has it come about that I am a sculptor at all? A sculptor is such a confoundedly special genius; there are so few subjects he can treat, so few things in life that bear upon his work, so few moods in which he himself is inclined to it.” (It may be noted that Rowland had heard him a dozen times affirm the flat reverse of all this.) ”If I had only been a painter--a little quiet, docile, matter-of-fact painter, like our friend Singleton--I should only have to open my Ariosto here to find a subject, to find color and att.i.tudes, stuffs and composition; I should only have to look up from the page at that mouldy old fountain against the blue sky, at that cypress alley wandering away like a procession of priests in couples, at the crags and hollows of the Sabine hills, to find myself grasping my brush. Best of all would be to be Ariosto himself, or one of his brotherhood. Then everything in nature would give you a hint, and every form of beauty be part of your stock. You would n't have to look at things only to say,--with tears of rage half the time,--'Oh, yes, it 's wonderfully pretty, but what the deuce can I do with it?' But a sculptor, now! That 's a pretty trade for a fellow who has got his living to make and yet is so d.a.m.nably const.i.tuted that he can't work to order, and considers that, aesthetically, clock ornaments don't pay! You can't model the serge-coated cypresses, nor those mouldering old Tritons and all the sunny sadness of that dried-up fountain; you can't put the light into marble--the lovely, caressing, consenting Italian light that you get so much of for nothing. Say that a dozen times in his life a man has a complete sculpturesque vision--a vision in which the imagination recognizes a subject and the subject kindles the imagination. It is a remunerative rate of work, and the intervals are comfortable!”