With most days she took her grandsire's boat to and fro the town, fetching or carrying; there was no mode of transit so cheap to him as this, whose only cost was her fatigue. With each passage up and down the river, she passed by the dwelling of Arslàn.
Sometimes she saw him; once or twice, in the twilight, he spoke to her; she only bent her head to hide her face from him, and rowed more quickly on her homeward way in silence. At other times, in his absence, and when she was safe from any detection, she entered the dismal solitudes wherein he labored, and gazed in rapt and awed amazement at the shapes that were shadowed forth upon the walls.
The service by which he gained his daily bread was on the waters, and took him often leagues away—simple hardy toil, among fishers and canal-carriers and barge-men. But it left him some few days, and all his nights, free for art; and never in all the years of his leisure had his fancy conceived, and his hand created, more exquisite dreams and more splendid fantasies than now in this bitter and cheerless time, when he labored amidst the poorest for the bare bread of life.
"Des belles choses peuvent se faire dans une cave:" and in truth the gloom of the cellar gives birth to an art more sublime than the light of the palace can ever beget.
Suffering shortens the years of the artist, and kills him oftentimes ere his prime be reached; but in suffering alone are all great works conceived.
The senses, the passions, the luxuries, the lusts of the flesh, the deliriums of the desires, the colors, the melodies, the fragrance, the indolences,—all that make the mere "living of life" delightful, all go to enrich and to deepen the human genius which steeps itself in them; but it is in exile from these that alone it can rise to its greatest.
The grass of the Holy River gathers perfume from the marvelous suns and the moonless nights, and the gorgeous bloom of the East, from the aromatic breath of the leopard and the perfume of the fallen pomegranate; from the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the caress of the girl-bathers' feet and the myrrh-dropping unguents that glide from the maidens' bare limbs in the moonlight,—the grass holds and feeds on them all. But not till the grass has been torn from the roots, and been crushed, and been bruised and destroyed, can the full odors exhale of all it has tasted and treasured.
Even thus the imagination of man may be great, but it can never be at its greatest until one serpent, with merciless fangs, has bitten it through and through, and impregnated it with passion and with poison—that one deathless serpent which is Memory.
Arslàn had never been more ceaselessly pursued by innumerable fantasies, and never had given to these a more terrible force, a more perfect utterance, than now, when the despair which possessed him was absolute,—when it seemed to him that he had striven in his last strife with fate, and been thrown never to rise again,—when he kept his body alive by such soulless, ceaseless labor as that of the oxen in the fields,—when he saw every hour drift by, barren, sullen, painful,—when only some dull yet stanch instinct of virility held him back from taking his own life in the bleak horror of these fruitless days,—when it seemed to him that his oath before Hermes to make men call him famous was idle as the sigh of a desert wind through the hollow ears of a skull bleaching white on the sand.
Yet he had never done greater things,—never in the long years through which he had pursued and studied art.