Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/317

Rh I had ever met with … Oh! sit down again, Marbol, and you, too, Bergmans; I haven't finished … Our walk ended in a long silence of thought.

"I reproached myself for my pusillanimity in regard to the man whom we left behind in the smithy. I should have embraced that victim of social stupidity and cried to him: *I understand you, proud wretch. How greatly plausible is your so-called aberration! I share your predilection for this refuge where you can give yourself up to the creative impulse without hindrance, where the person who pays you does not set your conscience and your liberty by the ears. How many artists are pigmies compared to you! Then, also, my good fellow, I divine in you a character too impressionable for you to repatriate yourself among geometrical humanity. A slight swerving would put you without the ban of ostensibly virtuous people. A false step would alienate you forever from those austere equilibrists. You prefer to this hypocritical and rectilinear society your strange equals, your comrades of the hulks. You live without mortification; you create according to your own fancy. That bread which you eat; no competitor will tear away from you, and you still less will steal from your brother in distress. No more struggle for existence, that struggle which finishes by taking all the color out of the artist's soul. No dealers, no exhibitions, no public. Around you poor beings who, without necessarily understanding your work better than acknowledged connoisseurs, excuse and respect your art, your vice, your rare vice, because you, on your part, do not think of wronging their subversive originality.'"

After this vindication of the defaulting and the downtrodden, a fierce argument arose between