“That’s it,” she answered, watching the thing take flight. “You are exactly like a schoolboy. A book, which you might delight in reading voluntarily, becomes a task if imposed upon you as a duty. I want you to paint this, so you don’t want to paint it. Your attention wanders, just as the schoolboy’s would, to all sorts of extraneous interests that don’t matter. Your art should be your enthusiasm and your obsession, and the difficult thing should be to get you away from a subject, not to attract you to it. I daresay, clever as you are, you might take a lesson in perseverance from many smaller men.”
“Perseverance, Fifine, is a dreadfully plebeian virtue,” said I.
“Well, then,” she retorted, “I like plebeian virtues. I can imagine even your despised M. Cabarus coming up here and refusing to leave until he had turned its poetic inspiration to some account.”
“To the account of scratching his egregious name on the walls, I expect.”
“Yes, you may joke. But anyhow his mastering purpose is to excel in the gift which Nature has bestowed on him.”
I fairly whistled out my astonishment.
“My good gossip, you are talking entirely without book. You know absolutely nothing about his mastering purpose. Why, you have only spoken to him once, like myself; and we have heard what the landlord said. I have just as much right from that to pronounce him a peddling coxcomb, idling away his time between rhyming and philandering. I should define him, if you asked me, as probably an erotic sentimentalist.”
“I don’t ask you. Besides, I like sentimentality—in reason.”
“Well, I don’t; and it is never in reason. I abhor it. It is always a manufactured emotion—like spread chords. The people who use spread chords, in playing, or singing, or talking, are hypocrites and impostors. I should liken them, morally, to procurers. They do not feel, they calculate, emotional effects. I have heard Shelley’s ‘Indian Serenade’ sung by that sort in a way to make one sick. ‘I ara-aise from dreams of thee in the first sweet er-ser-leep of night.’ Bah!”
“Felix!” said Fifine, amazed; “are you off your head?”