“But there will be no failure,” he continued, impressively. “I have taken the right road. I haven’t any time for silly scruples—for money-getting. That faculty of scraping up dollars is an inferior one, and those who have it must contribute to me. The world shall support me; it shall give me my time—that’s the great luxury—and my peace, too, until in my own way I have completed my work. Some century hence your uncle will be known by a footnote in my biography. And one should not grudge a heavy payment for fame, however it may come or however modest it may be.”
Miss Anthon was impressed by the fervour of the man’s passion for his own life, by his unbounding egotism, by his force. It excited her in much the same way that Wilbur’s little epic had excited her; only, with this difference: here was a creed, a consistent valuation of facts. And this creed seemed grander, vaguer, with limitless ends. It demanded more faith from its believers, but for that reason it was not unacceptable to a woman.
“The world must believe in you, like a prophet without works, at present. Success is its own justification. Yet that is a brutal doctrine,” the girl mused.
“It is a great law of life,” Erard asserted, “both for the despot and the stock-broker.”
“I believe it,” she assented. “I believe you. Of course accidents may come, such as disease or death, leaving you a wreck with a broken reputation. But that is the risk you take voluntarily, as well as the pain of always being a dependent. You have no time to make compromises with life, to spend your strong, creative years earning your freedom. You are right!”
Her sympathy, always so ready to go out to anything which promised relief from triviality, invested Erard with the interest of a hero. What he might accomplish ultimately, its value to himself, to others, intrinsically, was a small matter. He despised the world, treated it haughtily, and that was enough for her. It was pleasant, too, to know that she might possibly have a share in this large venture, just as she had taken part in Wilbur’s crisis. Erard was still within her range.
And Erard, himself, was the most interesting man she had ever known. Her pride was exquisitely flattered at the thought of her own emancipation in sympathizing with him thus instead of despising him. She could hold him, as it were, aloof, and judge him as the others, morally, according to the old code; and then accept him when he tickled her intellect.
Erard took her into his confidence as one who was liberal enough to understand his case. He took pains to explain his reasons for drawing away from painting and enlarging his critical field—some of the reasons. He talked freely, without irony now, partly from a natural yearning to justify and magnify his sinuous existence, and partly because this eager-minded woman was the much-beloved niece of Sebastian Anthon. He charmed her with intimate confessions.
“The thing that must stand out from me embodied—mine, yet not mine,—cannot be born from nothing, from unconscious nature. Into me must enter a knowledge of past experiments ... man cannot cut himself off from the tradition; he can only push on a step beyond.”
To her excited imagination this vague doctrine implied a new great art. He described his manner of approach in large phrases, and with bravado told how he had “cultivated his receptive powers as delicately as a French market-garden. To have a most finely sensitive sensorium—that is the first necessity. Now I am schooled,” he ended cynically, “they tell me, ‘Use yourself in teaching or painting portraits of corpses like Mrs. Warmister. Turn your nicely sharpened sword to whittling wood.’ Never!”