"Yes, perhaps. Perhaps you do realise it, as an intellectual question. But would you, do most men, realise it as life realises it? It is one thing to imagine one's duty to one's wife, when, as a bachelor, used to all manner of self-indulgence, one sits smoking over the fire. But to carry out that duty in life taxes the character. Swiftness of responsion, tact, is rarer than genius. I imagine that with you, temporary sensation counts for more than an ordered, and possibly rigid, attitude, towards life as a whole."
"Both count for very much; or did. Nothing seems very much at this moment."
"Ottalie loved you," said Leslie simply. "But she felt that there was this want in you, of so thinking things home that they become character. She thought you too ready to surrender to immediate and, perhaps, wayward emotions. She was not sure that you could help her to be the finest thing possible to her, nor that she could so help you."
"How do you know this?"
"She discussed it with me. She wanted my help. I said that I ought not to interfere, but that, on the whole, I thought that she was right. That, in fact, your love was not in the depths of your nature. I said this; but I added that you were too sensitive to impressions not to grow, and that (rightly influenced) there is hardly anything which you might not become. The danger which threatens you seems to me to threaten all artists. Art is a great strain. It compels selfishness. I have wondered whether, if things had been different, if you had married Ottalie, you could have come from creating heroines to tend a wife's headache; or, with a headache yourself, have seen the heroine in her. We have life before us. You are all tenderness and nobleness now. It is sad that we have not this always in our minds."
"Yes," said Roger. "We have life; and all my old life is a house of cards. Before this it seemed a noble thing to strive with my whole strength to express certain principles, and to give reality and beauty to imagined character. I worked to please her. And often I did not understand her, and did not know her. I have walked in her mind, and the houses were all shut up. I could only knock at the doors and listen. And now I never shall know. I only know that she was a very beautiful thing, and that I loved her, and tried to make my work worthy of her."
"She loved you, too," said Leslie. "Whatever death may be, we ought to look upon it as a part of life. Try to be all that you might have been with her. Never mind about your work. You have been too fond of emotional self-indulgence. Set that aside, and go on. She would have married you. Try to realise that. Her nature would have been a part of yours. All your character would have been sifted and tested and refined by her. Now let us go in, Roger. Tell me what you are going to do."
"There is not much to do. I must try to rearrange my life. But I see one thing, I think, that art is very frightful when it has not the seriousness of life and death in it."
"Yes," said Leslie. "Maggie and I went into that together. We built up a theory that the art life is strangely like the life of the religious contemplative. Both attract men by the gratification of emotion as well as by the possibility of perfection. One of the great Spanish saints, I think it is St. John of Avila, says that many novices deliberately indulge themselves in religious emotion, for the sake of the emotion, instead of for the love of God; but that the knowledge of God is only revealed to those who get beyond that stage, and can endure stages of 'stypticities and drynesses,' with the same fervour. It seems to us (of course we are both Philistines) that modern art does not take enough out of those who produce it. The world flatters them too much. I suspect that flattery of the world is going on in return."
"Not from the best."