The gladness of the man is come when the crowds lisp his name, and the gold fills his hand, and the women's honeyed adulations buzz like golden bees about his path; but how often is the greatness of the artist gone, and gone for ever!
Because when the world denies you it is easy to deny the world; because when the bread is bitter it is easy not to linger at the meal; because when the oil is low it is easy to rise with dawn; because when the body is without surfeit or temptation it is easy to rise above earth on the wings of the spirit. Poverty is very terrible to you, and kills your soul in you sometimes; but it is like the northern blast that lashes men into Vikings; it is not the soft, luscious south wind that lulls them into lotos-eaters.
I have grave doubts of Mrs. Siddons. She was a goddess of the age of fret and fume, of stalk and strut, of trilled R's and of nodding plumes. If we had Siddons now I fear we should hiss; I am quite sure we should yawn. She must have been Melpomene always; Nature never.
Oh, how wise you are and how just!—if there be a spectacle on earth to rejoice the angels, it is your treatment of the animals that you say God has given unto you!
It is not for me, a little dog, to touch on such awful mysteries; but—sometimes—I wonder, if ever He ask you how you have dealt with His gift, what will you answer then?
If all your slaughtered millions should instead answer for you—if all the countless and unpitied dead, all the goaded, maddened beasts from forest and desert who were torn asunder in the holidays of Rome; and all the innocent, playful, gentle lives of little home-bred creatures that have been racked by the knives, and torn by the poisons, and convulsed by the torments, of your modern Science, should, instead, answer, with one mighty voice, of a woe no longer inarticulate, of an accusation no more disregarded, what then? Well! Then, if it be done unto you as you have done, you will seek for mercy and find none in all the width of the universe; you will writhe, and none shall release you; you will pray, and none shall hear.
"These fine things don't make one's happiness," I murmured pensively to Fanfreluche.