The people who can't--some of them don't so much as know it when they see it--would shut their inkstands, and we shouldn't be deluged by this flood of rubbish!"I shall not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, nor to explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company, Mark Ambient revealed to me more and more the consistency of his creative spirit, the spirit in him that felt all life as plastic material.I could but envy him the force of that passion, and it was at any rate through the receipt of this impression that by the time we returned I had gained the sense of intimacy with him that I have noted.Before we got up for the homeward stretch he alluded to his wife's having once--or perhaps more than once--asked him whether he should like Dolcino to read "Beltraffio." He must have been unaware at the moment of all that this conveyed to me--as well doubtless of my extreme curiosity to hear what he had replied.He had said how much he hoped Dolcino would read ALL his works--when he was twenty;he should like him to know what his father had done.Before twenty it would be useless; he wouldn't understand them.
"And meanwhile do you propose to hide them--to lock them up in a drawer?" Mrs.Ambient had proceeded.
"Oh no--we must simply tell him they're not intended for small boys.
If you bring him up properly after that he won't touch them."To this Mrs.Ambient had made answer that it might be very awkward when he was about fifteen, say; and I asked her husband if it were his opinion in general, then, that young people shouldn't read novels.
"Good ones--certainly not!" said my companion.I suppose I had had other views, for I remember saying that for myself I wasn't sure it was bad for them if the novels were "good" to the right intensity of goodness."Bad for THEM, I don't say so much!" my companion returned."But very bad, I'm afraid, for the poor dear old novel itself." That oblique accidental allusion to his wife's attitude was followed by a greater breadth of reference as we walked home."The difference between us is simply the opposition between two distinct ways of looking at the world, which have never succeeded in getting on together, or in making any kind of common household, since the beginning of time.They've borne all sorts of names, and my wife would tell you it's the difference between Christian and Pagan.Imay be a pagan, but I don't like the name; it sounds sectarian.She thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek.It's the difference between making the most of life and making the least, so that you'll get another better one in some other time and place.
Will it be a sin to make the most of that one, too, I wonder; and shall we have to be bribed off in the future state as well as in the present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty--I don't know, I doubt if a poor devil CAN; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it.My wife holds that we shouldn't cultivate or enjoy it without extraordinary precautions and reserves.She's always afraid of it, always on her guard.I don't know what it can ever have done to her, what grudge it owes her or what resentment rides.And she's so pretty, too, herself! Don't you think she's lovely? She was at any rate when we married.At that time I wasn't aware of that difference I speak of--I thought it all came to the same thing: in the end, as they say.
Well, perhaps it will in the end.I don't know what the end will be.
Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that's the way I try to show them in any professed picture.But you mustn't talk to Mrs.
Ambient about things as they are.She has a mortal dread of things as they are.""She's afraid of them for Dolcino," I said: surprised a moment afterwards at being in a position--thanks to Miss Ambient--to be so explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark shouldn't have shown visibly that he wondered what the deuce I knew about it.But he didn't; he simply declared with a tenderness that touched me: "Ah nothing shall ever hurt HIM!"He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of home, and if he be judged to have aired overmuch his grievance I'm afraid Imust admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly that hitherto, to the best of my belief, he had rarely let this particular cat out of the bag."She thinks me immoral--that's the long and short of it," he said as we paused outside a moment and his hand rested on one of the bars of his gate; while his conscious expressive perceptive eyes--the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual Englishman--viewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took part in the declaration."It's very strange when one thinks it all over, and there's a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out.She's a very nice woman, extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters.Yet her conception of a novel--she has explained it to me once or twice, and she doesn't do it badly as exposition--is a thing so false that it makes me blush.It's a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn.It's two different ways of looking at the whole affair," he repeated, pushing open the gate."And they're irreconcilable!" he added with a sigh.We went forward to the house, but on the walk, half-way to the door, he stopped and said to me:
