Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 11).djvu/428

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[Lightly.] Yes, it occurred to you to make portrait-busts of gentlemen and ladies.

Professor Rubek.

[Nods.] To order, yes. With animals' faces behind the masks. These I threw in gratis—into the bargain, you understand. [Smiling.] But that was not precisely what I had in my mind.

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What, then?

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[Again serious.] It was this, that all the talk about the artist's vocation and the artist's mission, and so forth, began to strike me as being very empty, and hollow, and meaningless at bottom.

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Then what would you put in its place?

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Life, Maia.

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Life?

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Yes, is not life in sunshine and in beauty a hundred times better worth while than to hang about to the end of your days in a raw, damp hole, and wear yourself out in a perpetual struggle with lumps of clay and blocks of stone?