or
seven years he had taught in the School of Art, saving money every
year, putting by a small sum of money out of the two hundred pounds
that he received from the Government, and all the money he got for
commissions. He accepted any commission, he had executed bas-reliefs
from photographs. He was determined to purchase his freedom, and a
sculptor requires money more than any other artist.

Rodney had always looked upon Dublin as a place to escape from. He had
always desired a country where there was sunshine and sculpture. The
day his father took him to the School of Art he had left his father
talking to the head-master, and had wandered away to look at a
Florentine bust, and this first glimpse of Italy had convinced him that
he must go to Italy and study Michael Angelo and Donatello. Only twice
had he relaxed the severity of his rule of life and spent his holidays
in Italy. He had gone there with forty pounds in his pocket, and had
studied art where art had grown up naturally, independent of Government
grants and mechanical instruction, in a mountain town like Perugia; and
his natural home had seemed to him those narrow, white streets streaked
with blue shadows. "Oh, how blue the shadows are there in the morning,"
he had said the other night to Harding, "and the magnificent sculpture
and painting! In the afternoon the sun is too hot, but at evening one
stands at the walls of the town and sees sunsets folding and unfolding
over Italy. I am at home amid those Southern people, and a splendid
pagan life is always before one's eyes, ready to one's hand. Beautiful
girls and boys are always knocking at one's doors. Beautiful nakedness
abounds. Sculpture is native to the orange zone--the embers of the
renaissance smoulder under orange-trees."

He had never believed in any Celtic renaissance, and all the talk he
had heard about stained glass and the revivals did not deceive him.
"Let the Gael disappear," he said. "He is doing it very nicely. Do not
interfere with his instinct. His instinct is to disappear in America.
Since Cormac's Chapel he has built nothing but mud cabins. Since the
Cross of Cong he has imported Virgins from Germany. However, if they
want sculpture in this last hour I will do some for them."

And Rodney had designed several altars and had done some religious
sculpture, or, as he put it to himself, he had done some sculpture on
religious themes. There was no such thing as religious sculpture, and
could not