"I thought you were going to talk about your work," she said softly.
"I am talking about it--of that and that alone. I want you to know how all that I live and love is part of it. For instance, think of the thousands of times the Annunciation has been painted, sculptured, and sung, and how I have toiled and moiled over the subject, and yet now at this moment when I see your great wistful 'Mary-eyes' fixed on me in half-humble, half-astonished questioning, I feel that the last word has not been said, the highest rung of knowledge has yet to be reached.... So you see how everything must be made to serve my work."
"Are you a poet?" she asked, quite carried away.
He shook his head, smiling. "I am not a poet, I am not an artist, neither am I an historian nor a psychologist; but I have to be all and a great deal more besides, for my work demands it."
Then he told her his whole story. His father, a university professor and distinguished jurist, had died young, not long after the death of his mother, at his birth. His uncle, a wealthy old bachelor who had travelled a great deal both on business and pleasure, had adopted him. He had given him a good education, and since made him an allowance sufficient to indulge his modest whims and requirements. Acting on his uncle's wishes he had gone abroad, and postponed for a time entering on the same academic career as his father, owing to his health having suffered severely from the strain of the examination, which he had passed with honours. His studies and researches in the history of art, which he had always pursued with ardour, had finally drawn him to Italy. More than churches and museums and picture galleries the teeming humanity and charm of personality in the Southern race attracted and enchanted him. It seemed to him as if contact with it awakened in him a new fresh human impulse and consciousness of his own powers. He was more than ever strongly impressed by the original unity of artistic endeavour and personal experience both in history and modern life.... Heroes of mythology and history, characters in poetry and painting, the creators and painters, too, all became to him so objective, so alive, that they seemed a part of his being. He had felt nearer than ever before to penetrating into the emotional world of bygone ages when living in the midst of a people who were saturated with history, yet in their thousand-year-old practice of Art had never lost touch with their own epoch. He learned to discriminate and date at first sight monuments of various periods, and trace them back step by step down the centuries. Creative Art was, and always would be, his inspiration and guide.... Art was able, above all, to wring speech from the dumbness of death, and to create new forms out of the dust of ages. The only thing still lacking was the key to the origin of all this amazing and convincing force. The A B C of the language was not forthcoming.
Lilly, with strained attention, strove to follow him. She had never heard anyone talk like this, and yet much that he said sounded familiar. It seemed to her as if some residue of long-past days left on the floor of her mind echoed to his ideas.
"One day it happened," he continued, "that while I was in Venice I started off on an excursion to Padua. By rail it is about as far as from Berlin to Potsdam. I was not attracted there by its art, for I was still on my honeymoon with the Early Venetians. I went for the sake of completeness. So I found myself in the little chapel where Giotto's frescoes are. You know him?"
"Giotto and Cimabue--of course," she answered proudly.
"Then I needn't explain further. I hadn't much enthusiasm left for him and his school, for, as I said just now, the Quattrocentists had turned my head. Now, please picture a ruined Roman amphitheatre overgrown with ivy--nothing but the outside walls still stand, like the walls of a garden--and somewhere in the middle the little chapel built of slates, every bit as bare as a Protestant conventicle in the royal realm of Prussia."
Lilly smiled. A fling at Protestantism always gratified her, like a personal favour.