Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/256

244 front of him, 'I have wondered a little at my apathy. Truly Italy seems little enough to me now, and once it seemed so much! I used to feel that I should never be able to express myself with adequacy in my painting until I had lived in Florence or Rome.'

'This phase is passing,' said Randal. 'In Goethe's time, and Byron's, and Shelley's, Italy meant a species of mental liberation, and it still seems to mean so to the Scandinavian races. Ibsen's young men and women feel this. Italy stands to them as the incarnation of the joie de vivre. But we others—French, English, and Germans, and even the Americans—begin to realise that modernity holds something greater and more actual than either the Mediæval or Renascence Art of "the land that consoled Europe for the loss of Greece." Italy as an ideal is completely played out, and nobody realises it more acutely than the Italians. It was a fine instinct which kept your Rossetti at home, even if the same instinct took other shapes not sanctioned by the approval of our young and socialistic poet-painters. There he could live in the Italy of his imagination. Though, I dare say,' he added, returning on his thought, 'sloth and chloral greatly assisted.'

'Perhaps you are right,' mused Wilson. 'Perhaps