ALDA.
I think of those who have overcome them. "Great men have been among us," though they be rare. Have we not had a Flaxman? But the artist must choose where he will worship. He cannot serve God and Mammon. That man of genius who thinks he can tamper with his glorious gifts, and for a season indulge in social excesses, stoop from his high calling to the dregs of earth, abandon himself to the stream of common life, and trust to his native powers to bring him up again;—O believe it, he plays a desperate game!—one that in nearly ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is fatal.
MEDON.
I begin to see your drift; but you would find it difficult to prove that the men who executed those works, on which we now look with wonder and despair, lived like anchorites, or were unexceptionable moral characters.
ALDA.
Will you not allow that they worked in a different spirit? Or do you suppose that it was by the possession of some sleight-of-hand that these things were performed?—That it was by some knack of chiselling, some secret of colouring now lost, that a Phidias or a Correggio still remain unapproached, and, as people will tell you, unapproachable?
MEDON.
They had a different nature to work from.
ALDA.