There were in him a certain coldness, strength, and indifference to sympathy, which, whilst they made his greatness as an artist, made his callousness as a man. It might have been sweet to others to find themselves thus remembered and pitied by another at an hour when their forces were spent, their fate friendless, and their hopes all dead. But it was not so to him, he only felt like the desert animal which, wounded, repulses every healing hand, and only seeks to die alone.
There was only one vulnerable, one tender, nerve in him, and this was the instinct of his genius. He had been nurtured in hardihood, and had drawn in endurance with every breath of his native air; he would have borne physical ills without one visible pang, and would have been indifferent to all mortal suffering; but for the powers in him for the art he adored, he had a child's weakness, a woman's softness.
He could not bear to die without leaving behind his life some work the world would cherish.
Call it folly, call it madness, it is both; the ivory Zeus that was to give its sculptor immortality lives but in tradition; the bronze Athene that was to guard the Piræus in eternal liberty has long been leveled with the dust; yet with every age the artist still gives life for fame, still cries, "Let my body perish, but make my work immortal!"
It was this in him now which stirred his heart with a new and gentler emotion; emotion which, while half disgust was also half gladness. This food was alms-given, since he had not earned it, and yet—by means of this sheer bodily subsistence—it would be possible for him to keep alive those dreams, that strength by which he still believed it in him to compel his fame from men.
He stood before the Phoebus in Pheræ, thinking; it stung him with a bitter torment; it humiliated him with a hateful burden—this debt which came he knew not whence, and which he never might be able to repay. And yet his heart was strangely moved; it seemed to him that the fate which thus wantonly, and with such curious persistence, placed life back into his hands, must needs be one that would bear no common fruit.
He opposed himself no more to it. He bent his head and broke bread, and ate and drank of the red wine:—he did not thank God or man as he broke his fast; he only looked in the mocking eyes of Hermes, and said in his heart:
"Since I must live, I will triumph."
And Hermes smiled: Hermes the wise, who had bought and sold the generations of men so long ago in the golden age, and who knew so well how they would barter away their greatness and their gladness, their bodies and their souls, for one sweet strain of his hollow reed pipe, for one sweet glance of his soulless Pandora's eyes.
Hermes—Hermes the liar, Hermes the wise—knew how men's oaths were kept.