He returned it the next day with disgust; he had found it intolerably depressing.
"A sculptor should model as Dante writes--you 're right there," he said.
"But when his genius is in eclipse, Dante is a dreadfully smoky lamp.
By what perversity of fate," he went on, "has it come about that I am a sculptor at all?
A sculptor is such a confoundedly special genius; there are so few subjects he can treat, so few things in life that bear upon his work, so few moods in which he himself is inclined to it." (It may be noted that Rowland had heard him a dozen times affirm the flat reverse of all this.) "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.

Say that a dozen times in his life a man has a complete sculpturesque vision--a vision in which the imagination recognizes a subject and the subject kindles the imagination.