d dear. He had none of these, he desired none of them;
and his genius sufficed to him in their stead.

It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel and sublime by
its intensity and purity, like the egotism of a mother in her child. To
it, as the mother to her child, he would have sacrificed every living
creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very
existence as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though
merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its impersonality; it
was untainted by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it
was independent of all sympathy; it was simply and intensely the passion
for immortality:--that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of all
great minds.

Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her
desolation, took the child Demophoon to nurture him as her own on the
food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would
give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the
mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian
joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of
bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the
soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly
discouraged; he strove against the Metanira of circumstance; he did his
best to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound him; and, as the
child Demophoon mourned for the great goddess that had nurtured him,
refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations of
the senses and the appetites, and beheld ever before his sight the
ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa who once and for ever had
anointed him as her own.

* * *

Men did not believe in him; what he wrought saddened and terrified them;
they turned aside to those who fed them on simpler and on sweeter food.

His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems
impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed
forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be
acceptable to the multitude. They were compounded of an idealism clear
and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They
were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world
caring only for a honied falsehood and a gilded gloss in every art,
would have none of them.

*