“The servants are constantly coming and going; there are always two or three on the road from the mansion to the town, and if this continues all the horses will become broken-winded.
“A theatrical manager has no time to be melancholy, and I have seldom been so for some time past. I am so deafened and overwhelmed that I am beginning to lose all understanding of the piece. As I support the character of impresario as well as that of Orlando, my task is a twofold one. When any difficulty arises recourse is had to me, and as my decisions are not always listened to as oracles, they degenerate into interminable discussions.
“If what is called living is to be always on one's legs, to be equal to twenty persons, to go up and down stairs and not to think for a minute during the day, I have never lived so much as during this week. Nevertheless, I have a smaller share in this animation than might be believed. The agitation is very shallow, and the stagnant, inflowing water might be found a few fathoms below; life does not penetrate me so readily as that, and my vitality is even the smallest when I seem to be working and engaging in what is going on. Action dulls and fatigues me to an extent which is inconceivable; when I am not employed actively, I think or at least dream, and this is a sort of existence, but I lose it as soon as I emerge from my porcelain-image repose.
“Up to the present I have done nothing, and I do not know whether I shall ever do anything. I cannot check my brain, which is all the difference between a man of talent and a man of genius; it is an endless boiling, wave urging wave; I cannot master this species of internal jet which rises from my heart to my head, and, for want of outlets, drowns all my thoughts. I can produce nothing, owing not to sterility, but to superabundance; my ideas spring up so thickset and close that they are stifled and cannot ripen. Never will execution, however rapid and impetuous it may be, attain to such velocity. When I write a phrase, the thought which it represents is already as far distant from me as though a century had elapsed instead of a second, and it often happens that in spite of myself I mingle with it something of the thought which has taken its place in my head.
“This is why I cannot live, whether as a poet or as a lover. I can only give out the ideas which have left me; I have women only when I have forgotten them, and am loving others;-a man, how can I bring forth my wish to the light since, hasten as I may, I lose the consciousness of what I do, and act only in accordance with a feeble reminiscence?
“To come upon a thought in a vein of your brain, to take it out rude at first like a block of marble as it is got from the quarry, to set it before you and, with a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other, to knock, cut, and scrape from morning till evening, and then carry off at night a pinch of dust to throw upon your writing-that is what I shall never be able to do.
“In idea I can separate the slender form from the coarse block very well, and have a very clear vision of it; but there are so many angles to knock away, so many splinters to make fly, so many strokes of rasp and hammer to be given in order to come near to the shape and lay hold on the just sinuosity of the contour, that my hands become blistered, and I let my chisel fall to the ground.
“If I persevere, the fatigue reaches such a degree of intensity that my inmost sight is totally darkened, and I can no longer distinguish through the cloud of marble the fair divinity which is concealed within its thickness. Then I pursue her at random and in groping fashion; I bite too deeply into one place, and do not go far enough into another; I take away what ought to have been a leg or an arm, and leave a compact mass where there ought to have been a void; instead of a goddess I make a grotesque, and sometimes even less, and the magnificent block drawn at so great expense and with so much toil from the entrails of the earth, hammered, cut, and hollowed out in all directions, looks more as if it had been gnawed and perforated by polyps to make a hive than fashioned by a statuary after a settled design.
“How dost thou contrive, Michael Angelo, to cut the marble in slices as a child carves a chestnut? of what steel were thine unconquered chisels formed? and what sturdy aides sustained you, all ye fertile artists and workers, whom no matter can resist, and who can cause your dream to flow entire into color and bronze?
“It is in a fashion an innocent and permissible vanity, after the cruel things that I have just told you of myself, and you will not be one to blame me for it, O Silvio! — but, though the universe be destined to know nothing of it, and my name be beforehand devoted to oblivion, I am a poet and a painter! I have had as beautiful ideas as any poet in the world; I have created types as pure and as divine as those that are most admired in the masters. I see them there before me as clear and as distinct as though they were really depicted, and were I able to open up a hole in my head, and place a glass in it to be looked through, there would be the most marvellous picture gallery that was ever seen. No earthly king can boast the possession of such a one. There are Rubenses as flaming and bright as the purest at Antwerp; my Raphaels are in the best state of preservation, and his Madonnas have no more gracious smiles; Buonarotti cannot contort a muscle in bolder and more terrible fashion; the sun of Venice shines upon this canvas as though it were signed 'Paulus Cagliari;' the Shadows of Rembrandt himself are heaped in the background of that frame where in the distance there trembles a pale star of light; the pictures wrought in the manner peculiar to myself would assuredly be scorned by none.
“I am quite aware that it looks strange for me to say this, and that I shall appear giddy with the coarse intoxication of the most foolish pride; but it is so, and nothing will shake my conviction of it. No one doubtless will share it; what then? Every one is born marked with a black or a white seal. Mine apparently is black.
“Sometimes, even, I have difficulty in covering up my thought sufficiently in this respect; it often happens that I speak too familiarly of these lofty geniuses whose footsteps should be adored, and whose statues should be contemplated from afar and on the knees. Once I forgot myself so far as to say 'We.' Happily it was before a person who did not notice it, else I should infallibly have been taken for the most enormous coxcomb that ever lived.
“I am a poet and a painter, Silvio; am I not?
“It is a mistake to believe that all those who have passed for having genius were really greater men than others. It is unknown how much was contributed to Raphael's reputation by the pupils and obscure painters whom he employed in his works; he gave his signature to the soul and talents of many-that is all.
“A great painter or a great writer occupies and fills by himself a whole century; his only care is to invade all styles at once, so that if a rival should start up he may accuse him at the very outset of plagiarism and check him at the first step in his career. These are well-known tactics, and though not new, succeed none the less every day.
“It may happen that a man who is already celebrated has precisely the same sort of talent that you would have had. Under penalty of being thought to copy him, you are obliged to turn aside your natural inspiration and cause it to take a different direction. You were born to blow full-mouthed on the heroic clarion or to evoke the wan phantoms of times that are no more, and you are obliged to play your fingers on the seven-holed flute or to make knots on a sofa in the recesses of some boudoir, simply because your father did not take the trouble to cast you in a mould eight or ten years sooner, and the world does not understand that two men may cultivate the same field.
“It is in this way that many noble intellects have been forced to take wittingly a path which is not theirs, and to keep for ever along the borders of their own domain from which they have been banished, happy still to cast a glance by stealth over the hedge, and to see on the other side blooming in the sun the beautiful variegated flowers which they possess as seeds but cannot sow for lack of soil.
“As regards myself, I do not know whether, — apart from the greater or less opportuneness of circumstances, the greater or less amount of air and sun, the door which has remained closed and which ought to have been opened, the meeting lost, the somebody whom I ought to have known and whom I have not known, — I should have ever attained to anything.
“I have not the necessary degree of stupidity to become what is absolutely called a genius, nor the enormous obstinacy which is afterwards deified under the fine name of 'will,' when the great man has arrived at the radiant mountain-top, and which is indispensable for reaching the latter; I am too well acquainted with the hollowness of all things and the rottenness that is in them, to cling for very long to any one of them and pursue it eagerly and solely through thick and thin.
“Men of genius are very narrow-minded, and it is on this account that they are men of genius. The want of intelligence prevents them from perceiving the obstacles which separate them from the object which they desire to reach; they go, and in two or three strides devour the intermediate spaces. As their minds are obstinately closed to certain courses, and they notice only such things as are the most immediately connected with their projects, they make a much smaller outlay of thought and action. Nothing distracts them, nothing turns them aside, they act rather by instinct than otherwise, and many when taken out of their special groove are mere ciphers in a way that it is difficult to understand.
“The making of good verses is assuredly a rare and charming gift; few people take more pleasure than I do in
