The next morning, factitiously bright after his bath, he is eating his breakfast, reading his newspaper, and looking at his watch. The night is over; the complicated organism is in full work again, with its air of absolute security. His newspaper, inspired by a millionaire to gain a millionaire’s ends by appealing to the ingenuousness of this clever struggler, is uneasy with accounts of attacks meditated on the established order. His mind is made up. The established order may not be perfect, but he is in favour of it. He has arrived at an equilibrium, unstable possibly, but an equilibrium. One push, and he would be over! Therefore, no push! He hardens his heart against the complaint of the unjustly treated. He has his own folk to think about.
The station is now drawing him like a magnet. He sees in his mind’s eye every yard of the way between the side-street and the office, and in imagination he can hear the clock striking at the other end. He must go; he must go! Several persons help him to go, and at the garden-gate he stoops and kisses that mysterious daughter. He strides down the side-street. Only a moment ago, it seems, he was striding up it! He turns into the long road. It is a grinding walk in the already hot sun. He reaches the station and descends into it, and is diminished from an eternal father to a mere unit of a throng. But on the platform he meets a jolly acquaintance. His face relaxes as they salute. “I say,” he says after an instant, bursting with a good thing, “Have you heard the tale about the—?”
ITALY—1910
I—NIGHT AND MORNING IN FLORENCE
Amid the infantile fluttering confusion caused by the arrival of the Milan express at Florence railway station, the thoughts of the artist as he falls sheer out of the compartment upon the soft bodies of hold-alls and struggling women, are not solely on the platform. This moment has grandeur. This city was the home of the supreme ones—Dante, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Brunelleschi. You have entered it.. . . Awe? I have never been aware of sentiments of awe towards any artists, save Charles Baudelaire. My secret attitude to them has always been that I would like to shake their hands and tell them briefly in their private slang, whatever their private slang was, that they had given immense pleasure to another artist. I have excepted Charles Baudelaire ever since I read his correspondence, in which he is eternally trying to borrow ten francs from some one, and if they cannot make it ten—then five. There is something so excessively poignant, and to me so humiliating, in the spectacle of the grand author of La Charogne going about among his acquaintance in search of a dollar, that I would only think about it when I wished to inflict on myself a penance. It is a spectacle unique. Like the King of Thule song in Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, it resembles nothing else of its kind. If the artist does not stand in awe before that monumental enigma of human pride which called itself Charles Baudelaire, how shall the artist’s posture be described?