Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 5
V
One warm, still day, late in the Roman autumn, our two young men were seated beneath one of the high-stemmed pines of the Villa Ludovisi. They had been spending an hour in the mouldy little garden-house where the colossal mask of the famous Juno looks out with blank eyes from that dusky corner which must seem to her the last possible stage of a lapse from Olympus. Then they had wandered out into the gardens and were lounging away the morning under the spell, as it seemed to them, of supreme romance. Roderick declared that he would go nowhere else, that after the Juno it was a profanation to look at anything but sky and trees. There was a fresco of Guercino, to which Rowland, though he had seen it on his former visit to Rome, went dutifully to pay his respects. But Roderick, though he had never seen it, declared that it couldn't be worth a fig and that he didn't care to look at ugly things. He remained stretched on his overcoat, which he had spread on the grass, while Rowland went off envying the intellectual comfort of genius, which can arrive at serene conclusions without disagreeable processes. When the latter came back his friend was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Rowland, in the geniality of a mood attuned to all the stored patiences that lurk in Roman survivals, found a good word to say for the Guercino; but chiefly he talked of the view from the little belvedere on the roof of the casino, and how it looked like the prospect from a castle turret in a fairy-tale.
"Very likely," said Roderick, throwing himself back with a yawn. "But I must let it pass. I've seen enough for the present; I 've reached the top of the hill. I 've an indigestion of impressions; I must work them off before I go in for any more. I don't want to look at any more of other people's works for a month—not even at nature's own. I want to look, if you please, at Roderick Hudson's. The result of it all is that I 'm not afraid. I can but try as well as the rest of them. The fellow who did that gazing goddess yonder only made an experiment. The other day when I was looking at Michael Angelo's Moses I was seized with a kind of exasperation, a reaction against all this mere passive enjoyment of grandeur, and, above all, against this perpetual platitude of spirit under imposed admirations. It was a rousing great success, certainly, that sat there before me, but somehow it was n't an inscrutable mystery, and it seemed to me, not perhaps that I should some day do as much, but that at least I might do as well."
"As you say, you can but try," said Rowland. "Achievement's only effort passionate enough."
"Well then, haven't I got up steam enough? It won't have been for want of your being a first-class stoker. It came over me just now that it 's exactly three months to a day since I left Northampton. I can't believe anything so ridiculous."
"It certainly seems more."
"It seems ten years. What an exquisite ass I was so short a time ago!"
"Do you feel," Rowland asked all amusedly, "so tremendously wise now?"
"Wise with the wisdom of the ages and the taste of a thousand fountains. Don't I look so? Surely I have n't the same face. Have n't I different eyes, a different skin, different legs and arms?"
"I can hardly say, because I've been too near you to catch the moments of change. But it 's very likely. You're, in the literal sense of the word, more civilised. I dare say," added Rowland, "that Miss Garland would think so."
"That's not what she would call it; she would say I'm spoiled; I'm not sure she wouldn't say that I'm already hideously corrupted."
Rowland asked few questions about Mary Garland, but he always listened narrowly to his companion's voluntary observations. "Are you very sure?"
"Why, she's a stern moralist, and she would infer from my appearance that I had become a gilded profligate." Roderick had in fact a Venetian watch-chain round his neck and a magnificent Roman intaglio on the third finger of his left hand.
"Shall you feel I take a liberty," said his companion, "if I tell you I don't think you quite see her all round."
"For heaven's sake," cried Roderick, laughing, "don't tell me she's not a moralist! It was for that I fell in love with her—and with security and sanity, all the 'saving clauses,' in her sweet, fresh per son."
"No woman who cares," his friend lucidly returned, "is ever more of a moralist than she is of a partisan. If she becomes that, it 's a sign she has ceased to care. I don't know whether I ever mentioned it," Rowland went on, "but I made out to my satisfaction all sorts of fine free things in Miss Garland. There 's nothing at all scanted about her but her experience; everything else is large. My conviction of her is that she 's very intelligent, but that she has never had a chance to prove it. Some day or other I 'm sure she 'll be right about everything."
"Right about everything!" Roderick cried in derision; "what a horrible description of one's future bride! I don't ask you to be a better Catholic than the Pope. I shall be content if she's right about my interests—for 'everything,' sometimes, may happen to be hostile to them. But I agree with you about her turn for grim devotion. It 's exactly what I built on, and, changed as I am, I 'm not changed about her. What becomes of all our emotions, our impressions," he pursued after a long pause, "all the material of thought that life pours into us at such a rate during such a memorable three months as these? There are twenty moments a week—a day, for that matter, some days—that seem supreme, twenty impressions that seem ultimate, that appear to form an intellectual era. But others come treading on their heels and sweeping them along, and they all melt like water into water and settle the question of precedence among themselves. The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one's ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room and take boarders."
"I fancy it 's our peculiar good luck that we don't see the limits of our minds," said Rowland. "We 're young, compared with what we may one day be. That belongs to youth; it's perhaps the best part of it. They say that old people do find themselves at last face to face with a solid blank wall and stand thumping against it in vain. It resounds, it seems to have something beyond it, but it won't move. That 's only a reason for living with open doors as long as we can."
"Open doors?" Roderick sounded. "Yes, let us close no doors that open upon Rome. For this, for the mind, must be the most breatheable air in the world it gives a new sense to the old Pax Romana. But though my doors may stand open to-day," he presently added, "I shall see no visitors. I want to pause and breathe; I want to give the desired vision a chance to descend. I 've been working hard for three months; now let my genius do the rest—the grand genius of me!"
Rowland, on his side, was not without provision for reflexion, and they lingered on in gentle desultory gossip. Rowland himself felt the need of intellectual rest, of a truce to present care for churches, statues and pictures, on even better grounds than his companion, inasmuch as he had really been living Roderick's intellectual life the past three months as well as his own. As he looked back on these animated weeks he drew a long breath of satisfaction almost as of relieved suspense. Roderick so far had justified his confidence and flattered his perspicacity; he was giving a splendid account of himself. He was changed even more than he himself suspected; he had stepped without faltering into his birthright, and was spending money, intellectually, with the freedom of a young heir who has just won an obstructive lawsuit. His eyes still rolled and his voice quavered, doubtless, quite as when they had enlivened the summer dusk on Cecilia's verandah; but in his person generally there was an indefinable expression of experience rapidly and easily assimilated. Rowland had been struck at the outset with the instinctive quickness of his observation and his free appropriation of whatever might serve his purpose. He had not been, for instance, half an hour on English soil before he perceived that he was dressed provincially, and he had immediately reformed his style with the most unerring tact. His appetite for novelty was insatiable, and for everything characteristically foreign, as it presented itself, he had an extravagant greeting; but in half an hour the novelty had faded, he had guessed the secret, he had plucked out the heart of the mystery and was clamouring for a keener sensation. At the end of a month he offered his companion's attention a riddle that took some reading. He had caught instinctively the keynote of the general, the contrasted European order. He observed and enjoyed, he criticised and rhapsodised, but though all things interested and many delighted him, none surprised or disconcerted; he invented short cuts and was all ready for the unexpected. Witnessing the rate at which he did intellectual execution on the general spectacle of European life, Rowland felt at moments a vague dismay for his future; he was eating his cake all at once and might have none left for the morrow. But we must live as our pulses are timed, and Roderick's struck the hour very often. He was by imagination, though he never became in manner, a natural man of the world; he had intuitively, as an artist, what one may call the historic consciousness. He asked Rowland questions which this halting dilettante was quite unable to answer, and of which he was equally unable to conceive where his friend had picked up the data. Roderick ended by answering them himself, tolerably to his satisfaction, and in a short time he had almost turned the tables and become in their walks and talks the accredited fountain of criticism. Rowland took a generous pleasure in all these facilities and felicities; Roderick was so much younger than he himself had ever been. Surely youth and genius hand in hand were the most beautiful sight in the world. Roderick added to this the charm of his more immediately personal qualities. The vivacity of his perceptions, the audacity of his imagination, the picturesqueness of his phrase when he was pleased—and even more when he was displeased—his abounding good-humour, his candour, his unclouded frankness, his unfailing impulse to share with his friend every emotion and impression; all this made comradeship a high, rare communion and interfused with a deeper amenity the wanderings and contemplations that beguiled their pilgrimage to Rome.
They had gone almost immediately to Paris and had spent their days at the Louvre and their evenings at the theatre. Roderick was divided in mind as to whether Titian or Mademoiselle Delaporte were the greater artist. They had come down through France to Genoa and Milan, had passed a fortnight in Venice and another in Florence, and had now been a month in Rome. Roderick had said that he meant to spend three months in simply looking, absorbing and reflecting, without putting pencil to paper. He looked indefatigably, and certainly saw great things—things greater doubtless at times than the intention of the artist. And yet he made few false steps and wasted little time in theories of what he ought to like and to dislike. He judged instinctively and passionately, but never vulgarly. At Venice for a couple of days he had half a fit of melancholy over the pretended discovery that he had missed his way and that the only proper vestment of plastic conceptions was the colouring of Titian and the Veronese. Then one morning the two young men had themselves rowed out to Torcello, and Roderick lay back for a couple of hours watching a brown-breasted gondolier make, in high relief against the sky of the Adriatic, muscular movements of a breadth and grace that he had never seen equalled. At the end he jerked himself up, with a violence that nearly swamped the boat, to declare that the only thing worth living for was to build a colossal bronze and set it aloft in the light of a public square. In Rome his first care was for the Vatican; he went there again and again. But the old imperial and papal city altogether delighted him; only there he really found what he had been looking for from the first, the sufficient negation of his native scene. And indeed Rome is the natural home of those spirits with which we just now claimed fellowship for Roderick—the spirits with a deep relish for the element of accumulation in the human picture and for the infinite superpositions of history. It is the immemorial city of convention; and in that still recent day the most impressive convention in all history was visible to men's eyes in the reverberating streets, erect in a gilded coach drawn by four black horses. Roderick's first fortnight was a high æsthetic revel. He declared that Rome made him feel and understand more things than he could express; he was sure that life must have there for all one's senses an incomparable fineness; that more interesting things must happen to one there than anywhere else. And he gave Rowland to understand that he meant to live freely and largely and be as interested as occasion demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of undue surrender to the senses, because in the first place there was in almost any crudity of "pleasure," refine upon it as the imagination might, a vulgar side which would disqualify it for Roderick's favour; and because in the second the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his genius to be dealt with, and to find that he could live largely enough, even quite riotously enough, without exceeding the circle of pure delights. Rowland took high satisfaction in this positive law, as he saw it, of his companion's spirit, the instinct of investing every gain of sense or soul in the enterprise of planned production. Production indeed was not always working at a clay model, but the form it sometimes took was none the less a safe one. He wrote frequent long letters to Mary Garland; when Rowland went with him to post them he thought wistfully of the fortune of the large loosely-written missives, which cost Roderick unconscionable sums in postage. He received punctual answers of a more frugal shape, written in a clear and delicate hand, on paper vexatiously thin. If Rowland was present when they came he turned away and thought of other things or tried to think. These were the only moments when his sympathy halted, and they were brief. For the rest he let the days go by unprotestingly, and enjoyed Roderick's serene efflorescence as he would have done a beautiful summer sunrise. Rome for the past month had been perfection. The annual descent of the Goths had not yet begun, and sunny leisure seemed to brood over the city. Roderick had taken out a note-book and was roughly sketching a memento of the great Juno. Suddenly there was a noise on the gravel, and the young men, looking up, saw three persons advancing. One was a woman of middle age, with a rather grand air and a great many furbelows. She looked very hard at our friends as she passed, and glanced back over her shoulder as if to quicken the step of a young girl who slowly followed her. She had such an expansive majesty of mien that Rowland supposed she must have some proprietary right in the villa and was not just then in a permissive mood. Beside her walked a little elderly man, tightly buttoned in a shabby black coat, but with a flower in his lappet and a pair of soiled light gloves. He was a semi-grotesque figure, and might have passed for a gentleman of the old school reduced by adversity to playing cicerone to foreigners of distinction. He had little black eyes that glittered like diamonds and rolled about like balls of quick silver, and a white moustache, cut short and as stiff as a worn-out brush. He was smiling with extreme urbanity and talking in a low mellifluous voice to the lady, who evidently was not attentive. At a considerable distance behind this couple strolled a young girl, apparently of about twenty. She was tall and slender and dressed with extreme elegance; she led by a cord a large poodle of the most fantastic aspect. He was combed and decked like a ram for sacrifice; his trunk and haunches were of the most transparent pink, his fleecy head and shoulders as white as jeweller's cotton, his tail and ears ornamented with long blue ribbons. He stepped along stiffly and solemnly beside his mistress, with an air of conscious elegance. There was something at first slightly absurd in the sight of a young lady gravely appended to an animal of these incongruous attributes, and Roderick, always quick to react, greeted the spectacle with frank amusement. The girl noticed it and turned her face full upon him; her expression was seemingly meant to enforce greater deference. It was not deference, however, that the show provoked, but startled submissive admiration; Roderick's smile fell dead, and he sat eagerly staring. A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes, a mass of dusky hair over a low forehead, a blooming oval of perfect purity, a flexible lip just touched with disdain, the step and carriage of a tired princess—these were the general features of his vision. The young lady walked slowly, letting her long dress rustle over the gravel; the young men had time to see her distinctly before she averted her face and went away. She left a vague sweet perfume behind her as she passed.
"Immortal powers," cried Roderick, "what a vision! In the name of transcendent perfection who is she?" He sprang up and stood looking after her till she rounded a turn in the avenue. "What a movement, what a manner, what a poise of the head! I wonder if she would sit to me?"
"You had better go and ask her," said Rowland in the same spirit. "She was quite beautiful enough."
"Beautiful? She's beauty's self—she's a revelation. I don't believe she 's living—she 's a phantasm, a vapour, an illusion!"
"The poodle," said Rowland, "is certainly alive."
"No, he too may be a grotesque phantom, like the black dog in Faust."
"I hope at least that the young lady has nothing in common with Mephistopleles. She looked dangerous."
"If beauty 's the wrong thing, as people think at Northampton," said Roderick, "she 's the incarnation of evil. The mamma and the queer old gentleman, moreover, are a pledge of her reality. Who are they all?"
"The Prince and Princess Ludovisi-Olimpiani and the principessina," suggested Rowland.
"There are no such people," said Roderick. "Besides, the little old man is n't the papa." Rowland smiled, wondering how he had ascertained these facts, and the young sculptor went on. "The old man 's a Roman, a hanger-on of the mamma, a useful personage who now and then gets asked to dinner. The ladies are foreigners from some northern country; I won't say which."
"Perhaps from our neighbouring State of Maine," said Rowland.
"No, she 's not an American, I 'll lay a wager on that. She 's a daughter of this elder world. We shall see her again, I pray my stars; but if we don't I shall have done something I never expected—I shall have had a glimpse of ideal beauty." He sat down again and went on with his sketch of the Juno, scrawled away for ten minutes, and then handed the result in silence to Rowland. Rowland uttered an exclamation of surprise and applause. The drawing represented the Juno as to the position of the head, the brow and the broad fillet across the hair; but the eyes, the mouth, the physiognomy were a straight recall of the young girl with the bedecked beast. "I 've been wanting a subject," said Roderick; "there 's one made to my hand! And now to tackle it!"
They saw no more of the marvellous maiden, though Roderick looked hopefully for some days into the carriages on the Pincian. She had evidently only been passing through Rome; Naples or Florence now happily possessed her, and she was guiding her fleecy companion through the Villa Reale or the Boboli Gardens with the same superb defiance of irony. Roderick went to work and spent a month shut up in his studio; he had an idea, and he was not to rest till he had embodied it. He had established himself in the basement of a huge, dusky, dilapidated old house in that long, tortuous and pre-eminently Roman street which leads, under more than one name, from the Corso to the Bridge of Saint Angelo. The black archway which admitted you might have served as the portal of the Augean stables, but you emerged presently upon a mouldy little court, of which the fourth side was formed by a narrow terrace overhanging the Tiber. Here, along the parapet, were stationed half a dozen shapeless fragments of sculpture, with a couple of meagre orange-trees in terra-cotta tubs and an oleander that never flowered. The unclean historic river swept beneath; behind were dusky, reeking walls, spotted here and there with hanging rags and flower-pots in windows; opposite, at a distance, were the bare brown banks of the stream, the huge rotunda of Saint Angelo, tipped with its seraphic statue, the dome of Saint Peter's and the broad-topped pines of the Villa Pamfili, The place was crumbling and shabby and sinister, but the river was delightful, the rent a trifle and everything romantic. Roderick was in the best humour with his quarters from the first, and was certain that the faculty of production would be intenser there in an hour than in twenty years at Northampton. His studio was a large empty room with a vaulted ceiling where the vague dark traces of an old fresco caused Rowland, whenever he spent an hour with his friend, to stare at it for some faint survival of floating draperies and clasping arms. Roderick had housed his personal effects economically in the same quarter. He occupied a fifth floor on the Ripetta, but he was only at home to sleep, for when he was not at work he was either lounging in Rowland's more luxurious rooms or strolling through streets and churches and gardens.
Rowland had found a convenient corner in a stately old palace close to the fountain of Trevi, and made himself a home to which books and pictures and prints and odds and ends of curious furniture gave an air of leisurely permanence. He had the habits of a collector; he spent half his afternoons ransacking the dusky magazines of the curiosity-mongers, and he often made his way in quest of a prize into the heart of impecunious Roman households which had been prevailed upon to listen—with closed doors and an impenetrably wary smile—to proposals for an hereditary "antique." In the evening often, under the lamp, amid dropped curtains and the scattered gleam of firelight upon polished carvings and mellow paintings, the two friends sat with their heads together, criticising intaglios and etchings, water-colour drawings and illuminated missals. Roderick's quick appreciation of every form of artistic beauty reminded his companion of the flexible temperament of those Italian artists of the sixteenth century who were indifferently painters and sculptors, sonneteers and engineers. When at his times of most seeing he saw the young sculptor's day pass in a single sustained flight, while his own was broken into a dozen conscious devices for disposing of the hours, and intermingled with sighs, half suppressed, some of them, for conscience' sake, over what he failed of in action and missed in possession, he felt a pang of some envious pain. But Rowland had two substantial aids for giving patience the air of contentment; he was an inquisitive reader and a passionate rambling rider. He plunged into bulky German octavos on Italian history and, during long afternoons spent in the saddle, ranged over the grassy desert that encircles Rome. As the season went on and the social groups began to constitute themselves he found that he knew a great many people and that he had easy occasion to know others. He enjoyed the quiet corner of a drawing-room beside an agreeable woman, and, though the machinery of what calls itself society seemed to him to have many superfluous wheels, he accepted invitations and made visits punctiliously, from the conviction that the only way not to be overcome by the ridiculous side of most of such observances is to take them with ordered gravity. He introduced Roderick right and left, and suffered him to make his way himself—an enterprise for which Roderick very soon displayed an all-sufficient capacity. Wherever he went he made, not exactly what is called a favourable impression, but what, from a practical point of view, is better—an ambiguous, almost a violent one. He took to evening parties as a duck to water, and before the winter was half over was the most freely and frequently discussed young man in the heterogeneous foreign colony. Rowland's theory of his own duty was to let him run his course and play his cards, only holding himself ready to point out shoals and pitfalls and administer a friendly propulsion through tight places. Roderick's manners on the precincts of the Pincian were quite the same as his manners on Cecilia's verandah; they were no manners, in strict parlance, at all. But it remained as true as before that it would have been impossible, on the whole, to violate ceremony with less of lasting offence. He interrupted, he contradicted, he spoke to people he had never seen and left his social creditors without the smallest conversational interest on their loans; he lounged and yawned, he talked loud when he should have talked low and low when he should have talked loud. Many people in consequence thought him insufferably conceited and declared that he ought to wait till he had some thing to show for his powers before assuming the airs of a spoiled celebrity. But to Rowland and to most friendly observers this judgement was quite beside the mark and the savour of the young man's naturalness as fine as good wine. He was prompt, spontaneous, sincere; there were so many people at dinner-tables and in studios who were not, that it seemed worth while to allow this rare specimen all possible freedom of action. If Roderick took the words out of your mouth when you were just prepared to deliver them with the most effective accent, he did it with a perfect good conscience and with no pretension of a better right to being heard, but simply because he was full to overflowing of his own momentary thought, which sprang from his lips without asking leave. There were persons waiting on your periods much more deferentially who were ten times more capable of letting you flounder, of a reflective impertinence. The young man received from various sources, chiefly feminine, enough finely-adjusted advice to have established him in life as an embodiment of the proprieties, and he received it, as he afterwards listened to criticisms on his statues, with unfaltering candour and good-humour. Here and there doubtless, as he went, he took in a reef in his sail; but he was too adventurous a spirit to be successfully tamed and he remained at most points the florid, rather strident young Virginian whose brilliant aridity had been the despair of Mr. Striker. All this was what friendly commentators (still chiefly feminine) alluded to when they spoke of his delightful freshness, and critics of harsher sensibilities (of the other sex) when they denounced his damned impertinence. His appearance re-enforced these impressions—his handsome face, his radiant unaverted eyes, his childish unmodulated voice. Afterwards, when those who loved him were in tears, there was something in all this unspotted brightness that seemed to lend a mockery to the causes of their sorrow.
Certainly, among the young men of genius who for so many ages have gone up to Rome to test their powers, none ever made a fairer beginning than Roderick. He rode his two horses at once with extraordinary good fortune; he established the happiest modus vivendi betwixt work and play. He wrestled all day with a mountain of clay in his studio, and chattered half the night away in Roman drawing-rooms. It all seemed part of a divine facility. He was passionately interested, he was feeling his powers; now that they had thoroughly kindled in the glowing æsthetic atmosphere of Rome the ardent young fellow should be pardoned for believing that he never was to see the end of them. He enjoyed immeasurably, after the chronic obstruction of home, the sublime act of creation. He kept models in his studio till they dropped with fatigue; he drew on other days at the Capitol and the Vatican till his own head swam with his eagerness and his limbs stiffened with the cold. He had promptly set up a life-sized figure which he called an "Adam," and was pushing it rapidly towards completion. There were naturally a great many wiseheads who smiled at his precipitancy and cited him as one more example of Yankee crudity—a capital recruit to the great army of those who wish to dance before they can walk. They were right, but Roderick was right too, for the success of his effort was not to have been foreseen; it partook really, in the case of this particular figure, of the miraculous. He was never afterwards to surpass the thing, to which a good judge here and there had been known to attribute a felicity of young inspiration achieved by no other piece of the period. To Rowland it seemed to justify grandly the highest hopes of his friend, and he said to himself that if he had staked his reputation on bringing out a young lion he ought now to pass for a famous connoisseur. In his elation he travelled up to Carrara and selected at the quarries the most magnificent block of marble he could find, and when it came down to Rome the two young men had a "celebration." They drove out to Albano, breakfasted boisterously (in their respective measure) at the inn, and lounged away the day in the sun on the top of Monte Cavo. Roderick's head was full of ideas for other works, which he described with infinite spirit and eloquence, as vividly as if they were ranged on their pedestals before him. He had irrepressible reactions; things he saw in the streets, in the country, things he heard and read, effects he found just missed or half expressed in the works of others, wrought on his mind for provocation, and he was terribly uneasy until in some form or other he had taken up the glove and set his lance in rest.
The Adam was put into marble, and all the world came to see it. Of the criticisms passed upon it this history undertakes to offer no record; over many of them the two young men had a daily laugh for a month, and some of the formulas of the commentators, restrictive or indulgent, furnished Roderick with a permanent supply of humorous catchwords. But people enough spoke flattering good sense to make the author of the work feel as if he were already half famous. It passed formally into Rowland's possession and was paid for as if an illustrious name had been chiselled on the pedestal. Poor Roderick owed by that hour every franc of the money. It was not for this, however, but because he was so gloriously in the mood, that, denying himself all breathing-time, on the same day he had given the last touch to the Adam, he began to shape the rough contour of an Eve. This experiment went forward with equal rapidity and success. Roderick lost his temper time and again with his models, who offered but a gross degenerate image of his splendid ideal; but his ideal, as he assured Rowland, became gradually such a fixed, vivid presence that he had only to shut his eyes to behold an image far more to his purpose than the poor girl who stood posturing at forty sous an hour. The Eve was finished in three months, and the feat was extraordinary, as well as the statue, which represented a creature of consummately wrought beauty. When the spring began to clasp the rugged old city in its branching arms it seemed to him that he had done a handsome winter's work and had fairly earned a holiday. He took a liberal one and lounged away at his ease the lovely Roman May. He looked very contented; with himself perhaps at times a trifle too obviously. But who could have said without good reason? He was "flushed with triumph"; this classic phrase portrayed him to Rowland's sense. He would lose himself in long reveries and emerge from them with a convulsed, refreshed face and larger motions. Rowland grudged him none of his gestures and rejoiced beyond any expression in the two guarantees of his power. He had these productions transported to his own apartment, and one warm evening in May he gave a little dinner in honour of the artist. It was small, but Rowland had meant it should be conveniently composed. He thought over his friends and chose four. They were all persons with whom he lived in a certain intimacy.