24
FOLLE-FARINE.
ever undesired, that could give him insight into or
empire over human raptures and affliction. Neither
did he spare himself any labor, however costly, however
exhausting, to enrich his brain with that varied learn-
ing, that multifarious scene which he held needful to
every artist who dared to desire greatness. The hire-
li»g beauty cf the wanton, the splendor of the sun and
sea, the charnel lore of anatomy, the secrets of dead
tongues and buried nations, the horrors of the lazar
wards and pest-houses, the glories of golden deserts
and purple vineyards, the flush of love on a young girl s
cheek, the rottenness of corruption on a dead man s
limbs, the hellish tint of a brothel, the divine calm of
an Eastern night; all things alike he studied, without
abhorrence as without delight, indifferent to all save
for one end—knowledge and art.
So entirely arrd undividedly did this possess him that
it seemed to have left him without other passions; even
as the surgeon dissects the fair lifeless body of some
woman's corpse, regardless of loveliness or sex, only
intent on the secret of disease, the mystery of forma-
tion, which he seeks therein, so did he study the phys-
ical beauty of women and their mortal corruption,
without other memories than those of art. He would
see the veil fall from off the limbs of a creature lovely
as a goddess, and would think only to himself—"How
shall I render this so that on my canvas it shall live
once more?"
One night, in the hot, close streets of Damascus, a
man was stabbed—a young Maronite—who lay dying in
the roadway, without sign or sound, whilst his assas-
sins fled ; the silver Syrian mcon shining full on his
white and scarlet robe, his calm, upturned face, his
lean hand knotted on the dagger he had been spared
no time to use; a famished street dog smelling at his
blood. Arslàn, passing through the city, saw and
paused beside him ; stood still and motionless, looking
down on the outstretched figure ; then drew his tablets
out and sketched the serene, rigid face, the flowing,
blood-soaked robes, the hungry animal mouthing at the
wound. Another painter, his familiar friend, follow-
ing on his steps, joined him a little later, and started
from his side in horror.
"MyGodl what do you do there?" he cried. "Do
you not see- -the man is dying."
Arslàn looked up—"I had not thought of that," he
answered.
It was thus always with him.
He was not cruel for the sake of cruelty. To animals
he was humane, to women gentle, to men serene; but
his art Was before all things with him, and with human-
ity he had little sympathy: and if he had passions,they
had wakened no more than as the drowsy tiger wakes
In the hot hush of noorr, half indifferent, half lustful,
to strike fiercely what comes before her, and then, hav-
ing slain, couches herself and sleeps again.
But for this absolute surrender of his life, his art had
as yet recompensed him nothing.
Men did not believe in him ; what he wrought saddened
and terrified them ; they turned aside to those who fed
them on simpler and on sweeter food.
His works were great, but they were such as the pub-
lic mind deems impious. They unveiled human corrup-
tion too nakedly, and they shadowed forth visions too
exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be ac-
ceptable to the multitude. They were compounded of
an idealism clear and cold as crystal, and of a reality
cruel and voluptuous as love. They were penetrated
with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world,
which only cares for a honeyed falsehood and a gilded
gloss in every art, would have none of them.
So for these twelve long years his labor had been
waste, his efforts been fruitless. Those years had been
costly to him in purse—travel, study, gold flung to fallen
women, sums spent on faithless friends,, utter indiffer-
ence to whosoever robbed him so long as he was left in
peace to pursue lofty aims and high endeavors ; all these
did their common work on wealth which was scanty in
the press of the world, though it had appeared inex-
haustible on the shores of the north sea. His labors
also were costly, and they brought him no return.
The indifférence to fortune of a man of genius is, to a
man of tlie world, the stupor of idiocy: from such a
stupor he was shaken one day to find himself face to
face with beggary.
His works were seen by few, and these few were an-
tagonistic to them.
All ways to fame were closed to him, either by the
envy of other painters, or by the apathies and the anti-
pathies of the nations themselves. In all lands he was
repulsed ; he roused the Jealousy of his compeers and
the terror of the multitudes. They hurled against him
the old worn-out cry that the omee of art was to give
pleasure, not pain; and when iris money was gone, so
that he could no longer, at his own cost expose his works
to the public gaze, they and Ire were alike obliterated
from the public marts ; they had always denied him fame
and they now thrust him quickly into oblivion, and
abandoned him to it without remorse, and even with
contentment.
He eould, indeed, with the facile power of eye and
touch that he possessed, have easily purchased a tem-
porary ease, an evanescent repute, if lie had given the
world from his pencil those themes for which it cared,
and descended to the common spheres of common art.
But he refused utterly to do this. The best and great-
est thing in him was his honesty to the genius where-
with he was gifted; he refused to prostitute it; he re-
fused to do other than to tell the truth as he saw it.
"This man blasphemes ; this man is immoral," his
enemies are always hooted against him.
It is what the world always says of those who utter
unwelcome truths in its unwilling ears.
So the words of the old Scald by his own northern
seashores came to pass; and at length, for the sake
of art, it came to this, that he perished for want of
bread.
For seven days he had been without food, except the
winter berries whieh he broke off the trees without, and
such handfuls of wheat as fe'l through the disjointed
timbers of the ceiling, for whose possession he disputed
with the rats.
The sheer, absolute poverty which leaves the man
whom it has seized without so much as even a crust
wherewith to break his fast, is commoner than the
world in general ever dreams. For he was now so poor
that for many months he had been unable to buy
fresh canvas on which to work, and had been driven
to chalk the outlines of the innumerable fancies that
Bursued him upon the bare smooth gray stone walls of
ie old granary in which he dwelt.
He let his life go silently away without complaint,
and without effort) because effort had been so long
unavailing, that he had discarded it in a contemptuous
despair.
He accepted his fate, seeing nothing strange in it, and
nothing pitiable ; since many men better than he had
borne the like. He could not have altered it without
beggary cr theft, and he thought either of these worse
than itself.
There were hecatombs of grain, bursting their sacks,
1 in the lofts above ; but when, once on each eighth day,
i the maltster owning them sent his men to fetch some
from the store, Arslàn let the boat be moored agairrst
the wall, be filled with barley, and be pushed away
again down the current, without saying once to the
rowers, " Wait; I starve!"
And yet, though like a miser amidst his gold, his
body starved amidst the noble shapes and the great
thoughts that his brain conceived and his hand called
into substance, he never once dreamed of abandoning
for any other the career to vMiich he had dedicated
himself from the earliest days that his boyish eyes had
watched the vast arc of the arctic lights glow above the
winter seas.
Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, off-
spring, religion—all that other men hold dear. He had
none of these, he desired none of them; and his genius
sufficed to him in their stead.
It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike
cruel and sublime by its intensity and purity, like the
egotism of a mother in her child ! To it, as the mother
to her child, he would have sacrificed every living
creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacri-
ficed his very existence as unhesitatingly. But it was
an egotism which, though merciless in its tyranny, was
as pure as snow in its impersonality ; it was untainted
by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it
was independent of all sympathy; itwas simply and
intensely the passion for immortality—that sublime
selfishness, that superb madness, of all great minds.
Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the
days of her desolation, took the child Demophoon, to
nurture him as her own on the food of gods, and to
plunge him through the flames of a fire that would give
him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid
fears of the mortal mother lost to the child forever-
more the possession of Olympian joys and of perpetual
youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of bodily-
needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the
life of the soul, and drag him from the purifying lires.
Yet he had not been utterly discouraged; he strove
against the Metaniera of circumstance, he did his best
to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound
him; and as the child Demophoon mourned for the
great goddess that had nurtured him, refusing to be
comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations
of the senses and the appetites, and beheld ever before
his sight the ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa
who once had annotated him as her own.
Even now, as the strength returned to his limbs and
the warmth to his veins, the old passion, the old wor-
ship, returned to him.
The momentary weakness which had assailed him
passed away, lie shook himself with a bitter impa-
tient scorn for the feebleness into which he had been
betrayed; and glanced around him still with a dull
wonder as to the strange chances which the night past
had brought. He was incredulous still; he thought
that his fancy, heated by long fasting, might have
cheated him; that he must have dreamed; and that the
food and fuel which he saw must surely have been his
own.
Yet reflection told him that this could not be ; he re-
membered that for several weeks his last coin had been
spent; that he had been glad to gather the birds' win-
ter berries to crush beneath his teeth, and gather the
dropped corn from the floor- to quiet the qualm of hun-
ger; that for many a day there had been no fire on the
hearth, and that only a frame which the long sunless
northern winters had braced in early youth, had en-
abled him to resist and endure the cold. Therefore, it
must be charity !
Charity I as the hateful truth came home to him, he
met the eyes of the white, slender-winged Hermes;
eyes that from out that colorless and smiling face
seemed to mock him with a cruel contempt.
His was the old old story ; the rod of wealth bartered
for the empty shell that gave forth music.
Hermes seemed to know it ahd to jeer him.
Hermes, the mischief-monger, and the trickster of
men, the inventive god who spent his days in chicanery
of his brethren, and his nights in the mockery of mor-
tals; the messenger of heaven who gave Pandora to
mankind; Hermes, the eternal type of unscrupulous
Success, seemed to have voice and cry to him: "Oh,
fool, fool, fool ! who listens for the music of the spheres
and disdains the only melody that men have ears to
hear—the melody of gold!"
Arslàn turned from the great cartoon of the gods in
Plieras, and went out into the daylight, and stripped
and plunged into the cold and turbulent stream. Its
chiliness and the combat of its current braced his
nerves and cleared his brain.
When he was clad, he left the grain-tower with the
white forms of its gods upon its walls, and walked
slowly down the bank of the river. Since life had been
forced back upon hrm he knew that it was incumbent
upon his manhood to support it by the toil of his hands
if men would not accept the labor of his brain.
Before, he had been too absorbed in his pursuit, too
devoted to it body and soul, to seek to sustain existence
by the sheer manual exertion which was the only thing
that he had left untried for self-maintenance. In a
manner too he was too proud ; not too proud to labor, but
too proud to easily endure to lay bare his needs to the
knowledge of others. But now, human charity must
have saved him ; a charity which he hated as the foulest
insult of his life; and he had no chance save to accept
it like a beggar bereft of all shame, or to seek such
work as would give him his daily bread.
So he went; feebly, for he was still weak from the
length of his famine.
The country was well known to him, but the people
not at all. He had come by hazard on the old ruin
where he dwelt, and had stayed there full a year.
These serene blue skies, these pale mists, these corn-
clad slopes, these fields of plenteous abundance, these
quiet homesteads, these fruit-harvests of this Norman
plain were in soothing contrast to all that his life had
known.
These old quaint cities, these little villages that
seemed always hushed with the sound of bells, these
quiet streams on which the calm sunlight slept so
peacefully, these green and golden lands of plenty that
stretched away to the dim gray distant sea—all these
had had a certain charm for him.
He had abided with them, partly because amidst
them it seemed possible to live on a handful of wfceat.
and a draught of water, unnoticed and unpitied ; partly
because having come hither on foot through many
lands and by long hardship, he had paused here weary
and incapable of further effort.
i Whilst the little gold he had had on him had lasted he:
had painted innumerable transcripts of its aneiesit
buildings, and of its summer and autumnal landscapes.
And of late—through the bitter winter—of late it had
seemed to him that it was as well to die here as else-
where.
When a man knows that his dead limbs will be hud-
dled into the common ditch of the poor, the nameless,,
and the unclaimed, and that his dead brain will only-
serve for soil to feed some little rank wayside poisonous:
weed, it will seldom seem of much moment in what
earth the ditch be dug, by what feet the sward be trod.
He went now on his way seeking work; he did not
care what; he asked for any that might serve to use-
such strength as hunger had .left in him, and to give
him his daily bread. But this is a great thmg to de-
mand in this world, and so he found it.
They repulsed him everywhere.
They had their own people in plenty, they had their
sturdy, tough, weather-beaten women, who labored all
I day in rain, or snow, or storm, for a i>ittance, and they
I had these in larger numbers than their field-worlc
needed. They looked at him askance; this man with,
the eyes of arctic blue and the grave gestures of a
king, who only asked to labor as the lowest among
them.   He was a stranger to them ; he did not speak
: their tongue with their accent; he looked, with that
white  beauty and that lofty stature, as though  he
could crush them in the hollow of his hand.
They would have none of him.
"He brings misfortune!'' they  said among  them»
selves; and they would have none of him.
He had an evil name with them.
i They said at eventide by their wood-fires that strange
things had been seen since he had come to the granary
by the river.
Once he had painted a study of the wondrous ch" t
Zagreus gazing in the fatal mirror, from the p>>..y
face of a stone-cutter's little fair son; the child was
I laughing, happy, healthful at noon, crowned with car-
natrons and river-lilies, and by sunset he was dead-
dead like the flowers that were still among his curls.
Once a girl had hired herself as a model to him for
an Egyptian wanton, half a singer and half a gipsy-
handsome, lithe, fantastic, voluptuous: the very night
she left the granary she was drowned in crossing a
wooden bridge of the river, which gave way under the
heavy tramp of a fantoccini player who accompanied
her.
i    Once he had sketched, for the corner of an Oriental
! study, a rare-plumaged bird of the south, which was
the idol of a water-carrier of the district, and the won-
der of all the children round: and from that date the
! bird had sickened, and drooped, and lost its colors, and
. pined until it died.
The boy's death had been from a sudden seizure of
' one of the many ills of infancy; the dancing-girl's had
come from a common accident due to the rottenness
of old worn water-soaked timber; the mocking-bird's
had arisen from the cruelty of captivity and the chills
of northern winds; all had been the result of simple
aecident and of natural circumstance. But they had
sufficed to fill with horror the minds of a peasantry
I always bigoted and strongly prejudiced against every
stranger; and it became to them a matter of implicit
credence that whatsoever living thing should be painted
by the artist Arslàn would assuredly never survive te
see the rising of the morrow's sun.
In consequence, for.leagues around they shunned
him; not man, nor woman, nor child would sit to him
as models; and now, when he sought the wage of a
daily labor among them, he was everywhere repulsed.
He had long repulsed human sympathy, and io its turn,
it repulsed him.
At last he turned and retraced his steps, baffled and
wearied, his early habits had made him familiar with.
all manner of agricultural toil ; he would have done the
task of the sower, the herdsman, the hewer of wood, or-
i the charcoal-burner; but they would none of them be-
I lieve this of one with his glance and his aspect; and
solicitation was new to his lips and bitter there as gall.
He took his way back along the line of the river; the
; beauty of the dawn had gone, the day was only now
chilly, heavy with a rank moisture from the steaming
: soil. Broken boughs and uprooted bushes were float-
ing on the turgid water, and over all the land there
: hung a sullen fog.
The pressure of the air, the humidity, the colorless
stillness that reigned throughout, weighed on lungs,
which fora score of years liad only breathed the pure,
strong, rarefied air of the north; he longed with a sud-
den passion to be once more amidst his native moun-
tains under the clear steel-like skies, and beside the
rush of the vast wild seas. Were it only to die as he
looked on them, it were better to die there than here.
He lorigexl, as merr in deserts thirst for drink, for one
breath of the strong salt air of the north, one sight of
the bright keen sea-born sun as it leapt at dawn from
the waters.
The crisp cold nights, the heavens which shone as.
steel, the forests filled with the cry of the wolves, the
mountains which the océan ceaselessly assailed, the
mighty waves which marched erect like armies, the
bitter arctic wind which like a saber cleft the darkness;
all these came back to him beloved and beautiful in all
their cruelty; desired by him, with a sick longing for
their freshness, for their fierceness, for their freedom.
As he dragged his tired limbs through the grasses
and looked out upon the sullen stream that flowed
beside him, an oar struck the water, a flat blank boat
drifted beneath the bank, a wild swan disturbed rose
i with a hiss from the sedges.
,    The boat was laden with grain ; there was only one
: rower in it, who steered by a string wound round her
' foot.
;    She did not lift her face as she wen t, by him ; but her
, bent brow and her bosom grew red. ahd she cut the
water with a swifter, sharper stroke; her features
were turned from him by that movement of her head,
but he saw the Eastern outline of the cheek and chin,
: the embrowned velvet of the skin, the half-bare beauty
i of the heaving chest and supple spine bent back in the
1 action of the oars, the long, slender, arched shape of
I the naked foot, round which the cord was twined:
their contour and their color struck him with a sudden
surprise.
Be had seen such oftentimes, eastwards, on the-
banks of golden rivers, treading, with such feet as