RODERICK HUDSON
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 colour 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 Sabines there, to find my picture begun. Best of all would it 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 devil can I do with it?' But a sculptor now, come! 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, on the one hand, unless the trumpet really sounds, and can't play, on the other, either at working or at anything else, while he's waiting for its call. 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 completely plastic vision—a vision in which the imagination recognises a real, valid
229
