en an artist is so unfortunate as to be full of the passion he wishes
to express, he cannot depict it because he is the thing itself instead
of its image. Art is the work of the brain, not of the heart. When you
are possessed by a subject you are a slave, not a master; you are like a
king besieged by his people. Too keen a feeling, at the moment when you
want to represent that feeling, causes an insurrection of the senses
against the governing faculty."

"Might we not convince ourselves of this by some further experiment?"
said the doctor.

"Cataneo, you might bring your tenor and the prima donna together
again," said Capraja to his friend.

"Well, gentlemen," said the Duke, "come to sup with me. We ought to
reconcile the tenor and la Clarina; otherwise the season will be ruined
in Venice."

The invitation was accepted.

"Gondoliers!" called Cataneo.

"One minute," said Vendramin. "Memmi is waiting for me at Florian's; I
cannot leave him to himself. We must make him tipsy to-night, or he will
kill himself to-morrow."

"_Corpo santo!_" exclaimed the Duke. "I must keep that young fellow
alive, for the happiness and future prospects of my race. I will invite
him, too."

They all went back to Florian's, where the assembled crowd were holding
an eager and stormy discussion to which the tenor's arrival put an end.
In one corner, near a window looking out on the colonnade, gloomy, with
a fixed gaze and rigid attitude, Emilio was a dismal image of despair.

"That crazy fellow," said the physician, in French, to Vendramin, "does
not know what he wants. Here is a man who can make of a Massimilla Doni
a being apart from the rest of creation, possessing her in heaven, amid
ideal splendor such as no power on earth can make real. He can behold
his mistress for ever sublime and pure, can always hear within him what
we have just heard on the seashore; can always live in the light of
a pair of eyes which create for him the warm and golden glow that
surrounds the Virgin in Titian's Assumption,--after Raphael had invented
it or had it revealed to him for the Transfiguration,--and this man only
longs to smirch the poem.

"By my advice he must needs combine his sensual joys and his heavenly
adoration in one woman. In short, like all the rest of us, he will have
a mistress. He had a divinity, and the wretched creature insists on her
being a female! I assure you, monsieur, he is resigning heaven. I will
not answer for it that he