, I
regret to see you fall back from your bold advance. You now claim for
your work that it cleaves strictly to Nature, because the model is taken
from life itself. It does not become me to doubt this, yet the stamp
of divinity which your Demeter bears is found in no mortal woman.
Understand me correctly! This is certainly no departure from the truth,
for the ideal often deserves this lofty name better than anything the
visible world offers to the eye; but hitherto you have done honour to
another truth. If I comprehend your art aright, its essence is opposed
to the addition of superhuman dignity and beauty, with which you, or the
model you used, strove to ennoble and deify your Demeter. Admirably
as you succeeded in doing so, it forces your work out of the sphere of
reality, whose boundary I never before saw you cross by a single inch.
Whether this occurred unconsciously to you in an hour of mental ecstasy,
or whether you felt that you still lacked the means to represent the
divine, and therefore returned to the older methods, I do not venture to
decide. But at the first examination of your work I was conscious of
one thing: It means for you a revolution, a rupture with your former
aspirations; and as--I willingly confess it--you had been marvellously
successful, it would have driven you, had your sight been spared, out
of your own course and into the arms of the ancients, perhaps to your
material profit, but scarcely to the advantage of art, which needs a
renewal of its vital energies."

"Let me assure you, my lord," Hermon protested, "that had I remained
able to continue to create, the success of the Demeter would never,
never have rendered me faithless to the conviction and method of
creation which I believed right; nay, before losing my sight, my whole
soul was absorbed in a new work which would have permitted me to remain
wholly and completely within the bounds of reality."

"The Arachne?" asked the King.

"Yes, my lord," cried Hermon ardently. "With its completion I expected
to render the greatest service, not only to myself, but to the cause of
truth."

Here Ptolemy interrupted with icy coldness: "Yet you were certainly
wrong; at least, if the Thracian Althea, who is the personification of
falsehood, had continued to be the model." Then he changed his tone, and
with the exclamation: "You are protected from the needs of life, unless
your rich uncle throws his property into the most insatiable of gulfs.
May St