“I see you have been writing—I thought you were attached to literature. I read it in your countenance, I heard it in your voice,” said Cesarini, seating himself.
“I have been idly beguiling a very idle leisure, it is true,” said Maltravers.
“But you do not write for yourself alone—you have an eye to the great tribunals—Time and the Public.”
“Not so, I assure you honestly,” said Maltravers, smiling. “If you look at the books on my table, you will see that they are the great masterpieces of ancient and modern lore—these are studies that discourage tyros—”
“But inspire them.”
“I do not think so. Models may form our taste as critics, but do not excite us to be authors. I fancy that our own emotions, our own sense of our destiny, make the great lever of the inert matter we accumulate. ‘Look in thy heart and write,’ said an old English writer,* who did not, however, practise what he preached. And you, Signor—”
* Sir Philip Sidney.
“Am nothing, and would be something,” said the young man, shortly and bitterly.
“And how does that wish not realise its object?”
“Merely because I am Italian,” said Cesarini. “With us there is no literary public—no vast reading class—we have dilettanti and literati, and students, and even authors; but these make only a coterie, not a public. I have written, I have published; but no one listened to me. I am an author without readers.”