"This man blasphemes; this man is immoral," his enemies had always hooted against him.
It is what the world always says of those who utter unwelcome truths in its unwilling ears.
So the words of the old Scald by his own northern seashores came to pass; and at length, for the sake of art, it came to this, that he perished for want of bread.
For seven days he had been without food, except the winter berries which he broke off the trees without, and such handfuls of wheat as fell through the disjointed timbers of the ceiling, for whose possession he disputed with the rats.
The sheer, absolute poverty which leaves the man whom it has seized without so much as even a crust wherewith to break his fast, is commoner than the world in general ever dreams. For he was now so poor that for many months he had been unable to buy fresh canvas on which to work, and had been driven to chalk the outlines of the innumerable fancies that pursued him upon the bare smooth gray stone walls of the old granary in which he dwelt.
He let his life go silently away without complaint, and without effort, because effort had been so long unavailing, that he had discarded it in a contemptuous despair.
He accepted his fate, seeing nothing strange in it, and nothing pitiable; since many men better than he had borne the like. He could not have altered it without beggary or theft, and he thought either of these worse than itself.
There were hecatombs of grain, bursting their sacks, in the lofts above; but when, once on each eighth day, the maltster owning them sent his men to fetch some from the store, Arslàn let the boat be moored against the wall, be filled with barley, and be pushed away again down the current, without saying once to the rowers, "Wait; I starve!"
And yet, though like a miser amidst his gold, his body starved amidst the noble shapes and the great thoughts that his brain conceived and his hand called into substance, he never once dreamed of abandoning for any other the career to which he had dedicated himself from the earliest days that his boyish eyes had watched the vast arc of the arctic lights glow above the winter seas.
Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, religion—all that other men hold dear. He had none of these, he desired none of them; and his genius sufficed to him in their stead.