Part 53 (2/2)
They were standing under the great gray dome of the Pantheon, innocent clear daylight flooding all the great gray building.
”Oh, isn't it beautiful, their idea of leaving the circle open to the sky?” Marise burst out. ”Doesn't it make our dark, modern churches with their imitation Gothic stained-gla.s.s seem cheap and affected? Every church all over the world ought to be like this, and then we human beings might be fit to live with.”
Livingstone put in a horrified protest, ”What! Miss all that exquisite twilight that makes a church a church? I was just thinking how fiercely, literally bright this noonday sun is. Daylight leaves no mystery, nothing to your imagination.”
Marise turned confidently to Mr. Crittenden as an ally. She was sure, as sure of anything in the world, that he must be on her side. But he hedged and said neutrally, ”Oh, great Scott! It would be a horrible act of tyranny to have every church like this. There are lots of folks who'd hate it. They have a right to have some things their way, haven't they?”
”Oh, I _didn't_ think _you'd_ take that side,” said Marise, feeling betrayed and longing for a sweeping, exclusive affirmation to match her own. He so often hedged, it seemed to her, wanted to qualify statements.
Oh--it came to her with a start--that was another form of truth-telling!
He was trying to make his statements express the truth, rather than his feelings!
He now said, judicially, ”As far as I personally go, it depends what I'm looking at. If I'm looking at a very fine statue or something that seems really beautiful to me, I want as good a light as possible to see it in.
If--if I should ever have any personal happiness in my life, I'd want daylight to see it by. But when it's a question of looking at the interior decoration of the average modern church, why, the more mystery and twilight the better.”
This made Marise laugh. He often made her laugh, more than she had ever laughed before. And yet he never told funny stories.
He now went on, ”I suppose it depends on your opinion of what there is to see. If you think your imagination can do better for you than reality, of course you want a lot left to it, and plenty of dark corners for it to work in. Just now, it seems to me that reality is so much beyond anything my poor, starved imagination could have done....”
He did not look at Marise as he spoke. His tone was perfectly matter of fact. She wondered what the other two made out of it. She knew very well what she made out of it.
VII
They were sitting on the terrazza in the evening, with several other people from the _pension_, having their coffee sociably around the big round table and looking out over the roofs and domes and church-towers of Rome. The conversation had been chit-chat, as was usual during meal-times, and Mr. Crittenden had contributed little to it. His ma.s.sive capacity for silence when he had nothing special to say was a constant source of wonder to Marise. Not to ”make talk,” even very commonplace talk, was a betrayal of a tacitly accepted code as much as calling Donna Antonia a ”bad-tempered, stupid old woman.” She had been taught that it was one of the pretenses which must be kept up under penalty of the ruin of all civilized intercourse. She envied and resented his freedom from it.
She addressed herself directly to him now to force him out of his reflective taciturnity. ”Do you agree to that, Mr. Crittenden?”
”To what?” he asked, making no decent pretense of being abashed because he had not been following the conversation.
”Why, Mr. Livingstone was saying that artists are the only human beings to be envied, the only human beings who really _live_, intensely.”
”They're the only ones who talk about it,” he offered as his variation on the dictum. ”That's what an artist _is_, isn't he? Somebody who happens to be put together so that it kills him to keep anything to himself. He just goes up in smoke, if he can't run and tell the world what he has seen, or tasted, or handled, or got hit by, and the way it made him feel. I admire and revere artists. They certainly do a lot for the rest of us. But I don't see any reason to think that they feel things any more intensely than anybody else, and I don't see anything so terribly enviable in their lot. There seems to be a lot of hard work about it, if you judge by the way they carry on. I don't see why you can't enjoy beauty and feel tragedy, even if you keep your mouth shut.
You can feel it just the same, can't you? I'm sure I've felt things about a million times more intensely than anything that ever got into a book. And I can't say I'm any less satisfied with my fate because I'm not thriftily trying to use those same feelings as raw material for an art.”
Marise was laughing outrageously by the time he had finished, partly at what he said, partly at Mr. Livingstone's scandalized expression. She was ashamed of the way she laughed over Mr. Crittenden's teasing of poor unconscious Mr. Livingstone.
”You don't understand, Crittenden, you don't get my point at all.
There's something--something--” Livingstone brought it out with a remnant of the provincial self-consciousness before fine phrases which he so deplored, ”there's something G.o.d-like, divine, in being an artist, _creating_ something.”
Mr. Crittenden moved from his negligent pose, tightened up a little.
”Oh, if you mean by 'artist' a cla.s.s broad enough to take in everybody who creates something, yes, of course, they're the only ones who really live. That's what most of us are trying to get a chance to do, trying to create a little order out of chaos. But that's pretty nearly the whole ant-heap of the human race, isn't it? Except the leisure cla.s.ses.”
Mr. Livingstone was in despair of making the Philistine understand.
”It's something we have so little of in America, it's hard for an American to recognize its existence,” he murmured to the company in extenuation of his compatriot's denseness.
Mr. Crittenden sat up straighter. ”I used to make my living buying and selling lumber in the New England states,” he said, addressing himself for once to the company, ”and on one of my trips I met a man in a narrow mountain valley up there who was a creator if there ever was one. He had started life as a mechanic, left school and went to work at sixteen, in a shop filled with soulless cogs and bolts and screws and springs. And his creative instinct rose up and seized on those things as the appointed raw stuff for his creation. When I saw him he was the head of one of the biggest metal-working factories in the country, a good many hundred men working for him, and devoted to him, turning out tools that have simplified the tasks of mechanics the world around. I never saw a happier man. I never saw a human life more completely fulfilled. Yes, you're right, Livingstone. The creators are the enviable ones.”
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