Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/150

 you to give it up—he 'd send you about your business. I 'm half Italian and half French, and, as a whole, an abandoned cosmopolite. What sort of a Greek should I be? I think the Judas is a capital idea for something. Much obliged to you, madam, for the suggestion. What an insidious little scoundrel one might make of him, sitting there nursing his money-bag and his treachery! There may be a great deal of interest in an ugly nose, my dear sir—especially if one has put it there."

"You mean there may be a great deal of character. Very likely," said Roderick, "but it 's not the sort of character I care for. I care only for beauty of Type—there it is, if you want to know. That 's as good a profession of faith as another. In future, so far as my things don't rise to that in a living way, you may set them down as failures. For me it 's either that or nothing. It 's against the taste of the day, I know; we 've really lost the faculty to understand beauty in the large ideal way. We stand like a race with shrunken muscles, staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted. But I don't hesitate to proclaim it—I mean to lift them again! I mean to go in for big things; that 's my notion of my art. I mean to do things that will be simple and sublime. You shall see if they won't be sublime. Excuse me if I brag a little; all those Italian fellows in the Renaissance used to brag. There was a sensation once common, I 'm sure, in the human breast—a kind of religious awe in the presence of a marble image newly created and expressing the human type in superhuman 116