Читать книгу In Paradise - Paul Heyse - Страница 8

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The sculptor had listened to this long confession in silence. And even now, when Felix ended, and began to pull to pieces a sprig of mignonette as carefully as though he were trying to count the stamens in the little blossoms, he betrayed neither by word nor look any opinion of what he had just heard.

"I find that you have made great progress in your old art of expressing yourself by silence," said the young man at length, with a somewhat forced lightness of tone. "Do you remember how I used to be able to tell from the degree, and, so to speak, from the pitch of your silence, just what you were thinking of my nonsense? I can tell in the same way now: you think my decision to become an artist is a mere absurdity. You used to tell me that I was not fit either for science or art--that I was an homme d'action. But there's no help for it now: if it is a wrong road--why, I am in it once for all and mean to follow it to the end. So speak out, and tell me candidly whether I must look up another master, or whether the lion will endure the company of the puppy in his cage--as he used to before he himself was a full-grown king of the desert?"

"What shall I say to you, my dear boy?" replied the sculptor, in his quiet, rather slow manner. "The thing is a matter of course. I need not say to you, well as you know me, that I can hardly base any very exalted hopes upon an art-apprentice who takes up his task somewhat as a man might marry a woman with whom he had not been especially in love, but who now, when his real sweetheart has given him the mitten, is a good enough last resort; that the future career of an art adopted thus out of spite, as it were, seems to me very doubtful. But then, too, I know you well enough to be sure that all the Phidiases and Michael Angelos in the world couldn't make you break your resolution, and that, if I should lock my door against you, you would be just the fellow to bind yourself out as an apprentice to the first of my colleagues you might chance upon. And then--to be honest--it is such a pleasure to me to have you back again at all, that out of pure selfishness I can't make any objection if your energy, instead of taking hold of real life, chooses to spend itself on a harmless bit of clay. For the rest--let us speak of it another time--or not at all, whichever pleases you better. In such matters we take no counsel, after all, but that of our own souls; and if this isn't always the best for us--why, we are sovereigns of ourselves, and have it in our own power to save or ruin ourselves according to our natures. Here is my hand, then. You can begin to-morrow, if you like, your apprenticeship as a kneader of clay and chipper of stone--and your baronial ancestors can turn in their graves at it as they please."

"Chaff away, dear old Hans!" cried the young man, joyously. "Now I'll stake my head that I will become a famous artist just to have the laugh on you! I will work from morning till night with a true malicious pleasure, grinding and fretting till the dilettante skin is rubbed off and something better appears below it. And you shall see that I have not spent these seven years altogether in lounging. If you will run through my sketch-books from both continents--but apropos, what have you been doing in the mean while? Is it not a shame that I haven't been able to keep track of your progress toward immortality, even by a wretched photograph? And here I have been running on for an hour over my own adventures, while the most glorious wonders of the world are waiting for me over yonder!"

He strode quickly across the yard, to which they had come back while they were talking, and entered the house.

"You will repent this haste, rash boy!" Jansen called after him, while an odd smile played about his lips. "You will indeed wonder over much that you see--but the wonders of the world that you dream of--they are still in this narrow room" (he pointed to his forehead), "and even there they are not always in the best light!"

With these words he unlocked one of the two lower doors, and let Felix pass in.

It was a second studio, adjoining that in which he had worked during the morning; a room precisely like the other, its walls painted in the same stone-color, and its great square window half draped in the same fashion. And yet no one would have believed that the same spirit ruled here that had created the dancing Bacchante in the next atelier.

On slender pedestals stood a multitude of figures, most of them of half life-size, such as are used for the decoration of Catholic churches, chapels and cemeteries. Some of them were just begun, some were almost finished works; and in all could be clearly recognized the hands of the pupils who had their execution in charge--sometimes more and sometimes less skillfully imitating the little original models, barely six inches high, that stood on small shelves beside the copies. While the latter were neatly cut in sandstone or in the cheaper marbles--and a few in wood, decorated with all manner of painting and gilding--the little models were in plaster, and spotted and nicked by constant use. Yet these doll-like little madonnas, saints and apostles, and praying and playing angels in their heavy draperies, had a certain odd and now and then almost caricatured life-likeness--so great that not all of its charm was lost, even in the dry copies made by the assistants. They had something of the same element of humor that Ariosto gives to his personages--which by no means lose in life or force because their author has lost his own simple faith in them.

"Allow me to ask," said Felix, after looking about blankly for a moment, "into whose room you have brought me? And is your good friend who practises this pious art hidden somewhere close by, so that one must be cautious in his criticisms?"

"You needn't be in the least disturbed, my dear fellow; the lord and master of this worshipful company stands before you."

"You, yourself? Dædalus with a saint's halo! The preacher in the wilderness of modern art actually at the foot of the cross! Before I believe that, I shall have to take the cowl myself, and declare poor naked Beauty to be an invention of the devil!"

The sculptor cast down his eyes for a moment.

"Yes, my dear fellow," he said, "this is what we have come to in our art-desert. You ask me for beauty, and I offer you clothes-racks with dolls'-heads! As long ago as when we were in Kiel, I had to learn that the world of to-day will have nothing to do with true art. You know how hard I found it to turn these stones of mine into bread. It was still worse when I moved to Hamburg, and there--" he checked himself suddenly, and turned away; "well, living is more expensive there, and I began to be older and less easily satisfied; and, when I could no longer support myself in the place--it was the wretched trading city's fault, I thought--I packed up my best models and sketches and came here, to the much-praised land of art, the 'Athens on the Iser,' of which so much is said and sung. You will soon learn how it is here. I won't begin as soon as you have crossed the threshold to sweep all the disagreeable things in the house out of the corners for you. I will only say that the Munich Philistine isn't a hair better than those on the Jungfernstieg or in our old Holstein. After I had managed, with great difficulty, to keep myself alive here for a year, and had hardly earned enough in the service of pure beauty to keep life in my body, I found that such misery was enough to make a man turn Catholic--and, as this spectacle shows, I did turn so, half-and-half. It wasn't so easy as it may seem to you here--to my shame! Besides a trace of conscience, which was always reminding me that

'Man, after all, has higher goals to seek

Than simply feeding seven times a week;'

besides my own humiliation before myself and a few of my good colleagues, I was hampered by a real lack of skill. It needs a good deal to take all the manliness out of one's self, so that one can fit himself to all the miserable complications, the twisted deformities and tameness of our modern civilization. But it only depends, after all, on one's capability of getting the humor out of the thing. The idea that I, an unmitigated pagan, should establish a manufactory of images of saints, struck me as so indescribably rich that one fine day I actually set to work to model a Saint Sebastian, in which task my knowledge of anatomy stood me in good stead. But, even here, I soon found that it is only 'clothes that make the man.' It was only when I betook myself to making draperies, trains, and sleeves, that the result took on the true devotional air such as the public is accustomed to and desires. And, since then, I have grown prosperous so fast that now I employ eight or ten assistants; and, if it goes on, I shall some day bid farewell to temporal affairs, in the odor of sanctity and as rich as----." (He named a colleague who enjoyed a continued rush of business.)

"Yes, my dear Icarus," continued he, still more laughingly, as Felix made no reply to these revelations, "you would not have believed it all, I know, when in the first fire of youth we rode our proud hobbies, and called every man a low fool who, in art or life, proved faithless to his ideals by a straw's breadth. But the mill of every-day life rubs off much that a man believed was bound to him as with iron--like a very part of himself. And here you have an example, worth your deep consideration, of that celebrated 'liberty' you think to find here. If I allow myself the liberty of doing what I cannot give up, I must, at the same time, make up my mind to work at absurdities with which my heart has no sympathy. In order to be an artist, such as I wish to be, I am compelled to make Nuremberg toys and to display them in the market-places. But, after all--behind my own back, as it were--I continue quietly to be my own master. Let thy troubled heart take courage, beloved son! thy old Dædalus hasn't even yet become quite so utterly bad as these trade-wares show him. I think you will give me back your esteem if I lead you now out of my holy into my profane atelier--out of my tailor's-shop into my paradise!"