matters of poetry; but yet I cannot limit and circumscribe my life within the twelve feet of an Alexandrine; there are a thousand things which disquiet me as much as a hemistich. It is not the condition of society and the reforms that should be made; I care little enough whether the peasants know how to read or not, and whether men eat bread or browse on grass; but a hundred thousand visions pass through my head in an hour which have not the least connection with caesura or rhyme, and it is this which causes me to execute so little, although I have more ideas than certain poets who might be burnt with their own works.
“I worship beauty and feel it; I can express it as well as the most amorous statuaries can comprehend it, and yet I sculpture nothing. The ugliness and imperfection of the rough sketch revolt me; I cannot wait until, by dint of polishing and repolishing, the work finally succeeds; if I could make up my mind to leave certain things in my work alone, whether in verse or in painting, I might perhaps in the end produce a poem or a picture that would make me famous, and those who love me (if there is anyone in the world who takes the trouble to do so) would not be obliged to believe in me on trust, and would have a triumphant reply to the sardonic sneerings of the detractors of that great but unknown genius-myself.
“I see many men who will take palette and pencils and cover their canvas without any great anxiety concerning what caprice is producing at the extremity of their brush, and others who will write a hundred verses one after another without making an erasure or once raising their eyes to the ceiling. I always admire themselves, even if I sometimes fail to admire their productions; from my heart I envy the charming intrepidity and happy blindness which prevent them from seeing even their most palpable faults. As soon as I have drawn anything wrong I see it at once, and am pre-occupied with it beyond measure; and as I am far more accomplished in theory than in practice, it very often happens that I am unable to correct a mistake of which I am conscious. In that event I turn the canvas with its face to the wall and never go back to it again.
“The idea of perfection is so present with me, that I am instantly seized with distaste for my work and prevented from carrying it on.
“Ah! when I compare its ugly pout on canvas or paper with the soft smiles of my thought, when I see a frightful bat passing in place of the beautiful dream that spread its long wings of light upon the bosom of my nights, when I see a thistle springing up from the idea of a rose, and hear an ass's bray where I looked for the sweetest melodies of the nightingale, I am so horribly disappointed, so angry with myself, so furious at my own impotence that I resolve never again to write or speak a single word of my life rather than thus commit crimes of high treason against my thoughts.
“I cannot even succeed in writing such a letter as I should wish. I often say something quite different; some portions are excessively developed, others dwindle away so as to become imperceptible, while frequently the idea which I intended to express is absent, or present only in a postscript.
“When commencing to write to you I had certainly no intention of telling you one-half of what I have said. I was merely going to inform you that we were about to act a play; but a word leads to a phrase; parentheses are big with other tittle parentheses which again contain others ready to be brought forth. There is no reason why such writing should come to an end, and should not extend to two hundred folio volumes, — which would assuredly be too much.
“As soon as I take up my pen a buzzing and a rustling of wings begin in my brain as though multitudes of cockchafers were set free within it. There is a knocking against the sides of my skull, a turning, ascending and descending with horrible noise; it is my thoughts which are fain to fly away, and are seeking for an outlet; they all endeavor to come forth at once; more than one breaks its legs and tears the crape of its wing in the attempt; sometimes the door is so blocked up that not one can cross the threshold and reach the paper.
“Such is my nature. Not an excellent one doubtless, but what can I do? The fault rests with the gods and not with me, poor helpless devil that I am. I have no need to entreat your indulgence, my dear Silvio; I have it beforehand, and you are so kind as to read my illegible scrawlings, my headless and tailless dreamings, through to the end. However unconnected and absurd they may be they have always interest for you because they come from me, and anything that is myself, even if it be not good, is not altogether without value in your eyes.
“I may let you see what is most revolting to the generality of men-sincere pride. But a truce for a while to all these fine things, and since I am writing to you about the piece that we are to perform, let us return to it and say something about it.
“The rehearsal took place to-day. I was never so confused in my life, not owing to the embarrassment inseparable from reciting anything before so many people, but from another cause. We were in costume and ready to begin; Theodore alone had not yet arrived. A message was sent to his room to know what was keeping him; he replied that he was just ready and was coming down.
“He came in fact I heard his step in the corridor long before he appeared, and yet no one in the world has a lighter step than Theodore; but the sympathy which I feel with him is so powerful that I can in a measure divine his movements through the walls, and, when I knew that he was about to lay his hand on the handle of the door, I was seized with a kind of trembling, and my heart beat with horrible violence. It seemed to me that something of importance in my life was about to be decided, and that I had reached a solemn and long-expected moment.
“The door opened slowly and closed in the same way.
“There was a general cry of admiration. The men applauded, and the women grew scarlet. Rosette alone became extremely pale and leaned against the wall, as though a sudden revelation were passing through her brain. She made, in a contrary direction, the same movement as I did. I always suspected her of loving Theodore.
“No doubt she at that moment believed as I did that the pretended Rosalind was really nothing less than a young and beautiful woman, and the frail card-castle of her hope all at once gave way, while mine rose upon its ruins; at least this is what I thought: I may, perhaps, be mistaken, for I was scarcely in a condition to make accurate observations.
“There were three or four pretty women present, without counting Rosette; they appeared to be revoltingly ugly. By the side of this sun the star of their beauty was suddenly eclipsed, and everyone was asking how it had been possible to think them even passable. Men who previously would have esteemed themselves most fortunate to have them as mistresses, would scarcely have been willing to take them as servants.
“The image which, till then, had shown itself only feebly and with vague outlines, the phantom that I had worshipped and vainly pursued was there before my eyes, living, palpable, no longer in twilight and vapor, but bathed in floods of white light; not in a vain disguise, but in its real costume; no longer in the derisive form of a young man, but with the features of the most charming woman.
“I experienced a sensation of enormous comfort, as though a mountain or two had been lifted off my breast. I felt my self-horror vanishing, and was released from the pain of regarding myself as a monster. I came again to conceive quite a pastoral opinion of myself, and all the violets of spring bloomed once more in my heart.
“He, or rather she (for I wish henceforth to forget that I had the stupidity to take her for a man) remained motionless for a minute on the threshold of the room, as though to give the gathering time to utter its first exclamation. A bright ray lit her up from head to foot, and on the dark back-ground of the corridor which receded far into the distance behind, the carved door case serving her as a frame, she shone as though the light had emanated from her instead of being merely reflected, and she might rather have been taken for a marvellous production of the brush than for a human creature made of flesh and bone.
“Her long brown hair, intermingled with strings of great pearls, fell in natural ringlets along her lovely cheeks! her shoulders and breast were uncovered, and I had never seen any in the world so beautiful; the sublimest marble cannot come near to such exquisite perfection. To see the life coursing beneath the clouded transparency! how white and yet so ruddy the flesh! how happily the harmonious golden tints effect the transition from skin to hair! what entrancing poems in the soft undulations of these outlines, more supple and velvety than the neck of a swan! Were there words to express what I feel I would give you a description fifty pages long; but languages were made by some scoundrels or other who had never gazed attentively on a woman's back or bosom, and we do not possess half of the most indispensable terms.
“I decidedly believe that I must become a sculptor, for to see such beauty and to be unable to express it in one way or another is sufficient to make a man furious and mad. I have made twenty sonnets to these shoulders but that is not enough: I should like something which I could touch with my finger and which would be exactly like; verses express only the phantom of beauty and not beauty itself. The painter attains to a more accurate semblance, but it is only a semblance. Sculpture has all the reality that anything completely false can possess; it has a multiple aspect, casts a shadow and may be touched. Your sculptured differs from your veritable mistress only in this that she is a little harder and does not speak-two very trifling defects!
