iggings, a life in
which art, beauty, so forth, have only their due share, as repose and
refreshment. It was all very well in former days also, when the people
for whom artists worked had a deal of struggle and misery, and required
some pure pleasure to make life endurable; but now-a-days, and with the
people for whom I should write, things are different. What is wanted
now-a-days is not art, but life. By whom do you think, would all the
beautiful useful things I could write, all the fiddle-faddle about
trees and streams and statues and love and aspiration (fine aspiration,
which never takes a practical shape!) be read? By wretched overworked
creatures, into whose life they might bring a moment of sweetness,
like a spray of apple blossom or a bunch of sweet-peas into some black
garret? Nothing of the kind. They would be read by a lot of intellectual
Sybarites, shutting themselves out, with their abominable artistic
religion, from all crude real life; they would be merely so much more
hothouse scents or exotic music (_con sordino_), to make them snooze
their lives away. Of course it is something to be a poet like those of
former days; something to be Tasso, and be read by that poor devil of a
fever-stricken watchmaker whom we met down in the plain of Lucca; but
to be a poet for the cultured world of to-day--oh, I would rather be a
French cook, and invent indigestible dishes for epicures without any
appetite remaining to them."

So saying, Cyril jumped out of the gig, and ran up the steep last ascent
of the hill. He had persuaded himself of his moral rightness and felt
quite happy.

Suddenly the road made a sharp bend between the overhanging rocks, grown
in all their fissures with dark ilex tufts and yellow broom and pale
pink cyclamen; it turned, and widened into a flat grass-grown place,
surrounded by cypresses on the top and ridge of the hill. Cyril ran to
the edge and gave a cry of pleasure. Below was stretched a wide strip of
Maremma swamp-land, mottled green and brown--green where the grass was
under water, brown where it was burned into cinders by the sun; with
here and there a patch of shining pond or canal; and at the extremity of
this, distinguishable from the greyish amber sky only by its superior
and intense luminousness, the sea--not blue nor green, but grey,
silvery, steel-like, as a mirror in the full sunshine. Baldwin stopped
the gig beneath the cypresses.

"Look there," he said, pointing with his whip