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 was the greater
artist. They had come down through France to Genoa and Milan, had spent
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 intentions 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 coloring
of Titian and Paul 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 making superb muscular
movements, in high relief, against the sky of the Adriatic, and at the
end jerked himself up with a violence that nearly swamped the gondola,
and declared that the only thing worth living for was to make a colossal
bronze and set it aloft in the light of a public square.
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