Is it too late to alter? These love-letters now, you
call his—I can't laugh at them.50
4th Student. Because you never read the sham letters
of our inditing which drew forth these.
Gottlieb. His discovery of the truth will be frightful.
4th Student. That's the joke. But you should have
joined us at the beginning; there's no doubt he loves the55
girl—loves a model he might hire by the hour!
Gottlieb. See here! "He has been accustomed," he
writes, "to have Canova's women about him, in stone,
and the world's women beside him, in flesh; these being
as much below, as those above, his soul's aspiration;60
but now he is to have the reality." There you laugh
again! I say, you wipe off the very dew of his youth.
1st Student. Schramm! (Take the pipe out of his
mouth, somebody!) Will Jules lose the bloom of his youth?65
Schramm. Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this
world: look at a blossom—it drops presently, having done
its service and lasted its time; but fruits succeed, and
where would be the blossom's place could it continue?
As well affirm that your eye is no longer in your body,70
because its earliest favorite, whatever it may have first
loved to look on, is dead and done with—as that any affection
is lost to the soul when its first object, whatever
happened first to satisfy it, is superseded in due course.
Keep but ever looking, whether with the body's eye or the75
mind's, and you will soon find something to look on! Has
a man done wondering at women?—there follow men,
dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at
men?—there's God to wonder at; and the faculty of wonder
may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with80
respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently,
so far as concerns its novel one. Thus—
1st Student. Put Schramm's pipe into his mouth again!
There you see! Well, this Jules—a wretched fribble
—oh, I watched his disportings at Possagno, the other85
day! Canova's gallery—you know: there he marches first
resolvedly past great works by the dozen without vouchsafing
an eye; all at once he stops full at the Psiche-fanciulla—cannot
pass that old acquaintance without a
nod of encouragement—"In your new place, beauty?90
Then behave yourself as well here as at Munich—I see
you!" Next he posts himself deliberately before the unfinished
Pietà for half an hour without moving, till up he
starts of a sudden, and thrusts his very nose into—I say,
into—the group; by which gesture you are informed that95
precisely the sole point he had not fully mastered in
Canova's practice was a certain method of using the drill
in the articulation of the knee-joint—and that, likewise,
has he mastered at length! Good-by, therefore, to poor
Canova—whose gallery no longer needs detain his successor100
Jules, the predestinated novel thinker in marble!
5th Student. Tell him about the women; go on to the
women!
1st Student. Why, on that matter he could never be
supercilious enough. How should we be other (he said)105
than the poor devils you see, with those debasing habits we
cherish? He was not to wallow in that mire, at least;
he would wait, and love only at the proper time, and
meanwhile put up with the Psiche-fanciulla. Now, I
happened to hear of a young Greek—real Greek girl at110
Malamocco; a true Islander, do you see, with Alciphron's
"hair like sea-moss"—Schramm knows!—white and quiet
as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest—a
daughter of Natalia, so she swears—that hag Natalia, who
helps us to models at three lire an hour. We selected115
this girl for the heroine of our jest. So first, Jules received
a scented letter—somebody had seen his Tydeus at the
Academy, and my picture was nothing to it: a profound
admirer bade him persevere—would make herself known to him
ere long. (Paolina, my little friend of the Fenice,120
transcribes divinely.) And in due time, the mysterious
correspondent gave certain hints of her peculiar charms—the
pale cheeks, the black hair—whatever, in short, had
struck us in our Malamocco model: we retained her name,
too—Phene, which is, by interpretation, sea-eagle. Now,125
think of Jules finding himself distinguished from the
herd of us by such a creature! In his very first answer
he proposed marrying his monitress: and fancy us over
these letters, two, three times a day, to receive and
dispatch! I concocted the main of it: relations were in130
the way—secrecy must be observed—in fine, would he
wed her on trust, and only speak to her when they were
indissolubly united? St—st—Here they come!