) "If I had only been a painter--a little quiet,
docile, matter-of-fact painter, like our friend Singleton--I should
only have to open my Ariosto here to find a subject, to find color and
attitudes, stuffs and composition; I should only have to look up from
the page at that mouldy old fountain against the blue sky, at that
cypress alley wandering away like a procession of priests in couples,
at the crags and hollows of the Sabine hills, to find myself grasping
my brush. Best of all would be to be Ariosto himself, or one of his
brotherhood. Then everything in nature would give you a hint, and every
form of beauty be part of your stock. You would n't have to look at
things only to say,--with tears of rage half the time,--'Oh, yes, it
's wonderfully pretty, but what the deuce can I do with it?' But a
sculptor, now! That 's a pretty trade for a fellow who has got his
living to make and yet is so damnably constituted that he can't work to
order, and considers that, aesthetically, clock ornaments don't pay! You
can't model the serge-coated cypresses, nor those mouldering old Tritons
and all the sunny sadness of that dried-up fountain; you can't put the
light into marble--the lovely, caressing, consenting Italian light that
you get so much of for nothing.
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