Folks are apt to imagine that, when the pains of the actual world get round about an artist's soul, the supreme moment has arrived for him to deliver himself in immortal utterances. This is untrue. He does n't so deliver himself. On the contrary, he cuts up his canvas, smashes his piano, and kicks his manuscript about the room. What interpretation of life, however celestially inspired, can have the all-annihilating poignancy of life itself? Your poet may write an immortal lyric by the death-bed of his mistress; but it is a proof that he did not care a brass farthing for the lady: he is expressing the grief that he might have felt if he had loved her. For the suffering artist, at grips with the great realities, art is only a trumpery matter. It is only when he is getting, or has got, better, that he composes his masterpieces working
... the world to sympathy
With hopes and fears it heeded not.
So Herold, instinctively obeying the common law, as all poor humans in one way or another have to do, grew heartsick at the vanity of his calling, and, after a mechanically perfect performance, wondered how an honest man could live such a life of shameless fraud.
After a night and dawn of rain the sun shone from a blue sky when he reached the Channel House next morning. Sir Oliver and Lady Blount received him in the dining-room. They looked very old and careworn. Like Constable, they had nothing to live for save Stellamaris; and now Stellamaris, stricken by an obscure but mortal malady, was dying before their eyes. So, antiphonally, and at first with singularly little bickering, they told Herold their story of despair. It added little to his knowledge. The symptoms of which he was already aware had intensified; that was all. But the two guardians had altered their opinion as to the cause. Sir Oliver ruefully discarded the theory of the touch of the sun, and his wife now realized that the state of Stellamaris was not merely the morbid phase through which most maidens are supposed to pass. Dr. Ransome, with intuition none too miraculous, had emitted the theory that she had something on her mind. “But what could the poor darling innocent child have on her mind?” cried Sir Oliver.
“What, indeed,” echoed Lady Blount, “unless her mind is affected?”
“Don't be a fool, Julia,” said Sir Oliver.
“I'm not such a fool as you think, Oliver. Stella has n't lived a normal life, and who knows but what the change of the last year may have done harm? Dr. Ransome himself said that if we could cure the mind, we could cure the body, and advised us to take her abroad so that she could be distracted by fresh scenes.”
“He hinted nothing about insanity. You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Sir Oliver, with querulous asperity.
Then Herold saw that the truth must be told.