Certainly no other. Technique of course; that much, after long effort of years, Edith could take for granted. But this—wasn't it beyond technique?
For the first time that evening—it had been nowhere near her while she was deep in work—Edith recalled Daumier's "The Jury." She took down the volume of his work, not trusting memory. After the comparison she could say No: a round, unworried, satisfying No. This curious thing of her own, this hating-fearing-loving-pitying distillation of the jury in People vs. Blake, owed no more to Daumier (or to Callista) than any work should honestly owe to whatever the artist has encountered in the past. Conception, development, fulfillment—unmistakably a Nolan original. Perhaps the first.
The drawing frightened her then in a different way, grown temporarily larger than her mind's resistance. These people were all looking at her, as the twelve faces of flesh and blood had seemed to for a moment in the afternoon, when someone in the row behind her had a loud coughing spell. They looked at her now, bloated Hoag and ancient Emerson Lake and cloth-brained Emma Beales and kindly Helen Butler, and by a trick of her exhausted mind they made her no longer Edith Nolan but a woman at the defense table, whose life would end or begin afresh somehow according to the will of those twelve imperfect beings. Who meant well; who wanted to "do the right thing," whatever that was; who (except maybe Hoag) wouldn't dream of turpentining a dog or pulling the wings off flies or starving a child.
She forced herself out of that illusion. Well, the illusion was at least fair evidence of power in the work. She warned herself: Discount everything: tired; the illusion is strong because of personal involvement in People vs. Blake; by morning the pen-and-ink may be ashes. But leaving it, turning out the light, Edith almost knew that it would not.
And she marveled, with something like the wonder of a child to whom all discovery is fresh and nothing worn down to the stale and bromidic, at the stubborn power of life to draw out of mold and decay an oak tree or a flower; out of confusion or sorrow a work of enduring good.
[5]
It is indeed some Excuse to be mad with the greater Part of Mankind.
ERASMUS, Colloquies