and the
child's breath spent. Genius is obligation.

* * *

"No woman, I think, ever loved you as this woman does, whom you have
left as I would not leave a dog," said Maryx, and something of his old
ardent eloquence returned to him, and his voice rose and rang clearer as
the courage in him consummated the self-sacrifice that he had set
himself for her sake. "Have you ever thought what you have done? When
you have killed Art in an artist, you have done the cruellest murder
that earth can behold. Other and weaker natures than hers might forget,
but she never. Her fame will be short-lived as that rose, for she sees
but your face, and the world will tire of that, but she will not. She
can dream no more. She can only remember. Do you know what that is to
the artist?--it is to be blind and to weary the world; the world that
has no more pity than you have! You think her consoled because her
genius has not left her: are you a poet and yet do not know that genius
is only a power to suffer more and to remember longer?--nothing else.
You say to yourself that she will have fame, that will beguile her as
the god came to Ariadne; perhaps; but across that fame, let it become
what it may, there will settle for ever the shadow of the world's
dishonour; it will be for ever poisoned, and cursed, and embittered by
the scorn of fools, and the reproach of women, since by you they have
been given their lashes of nettles, and by you have been given their
by-word to hoot. She will walk in the light of triumph, you say, and
therefore you have not hurt her; do you not see that the fiercer that
light may beat on her, the sharper will the eyes of the world search out
the brand with which you have burned her. For when do men forgive force
in the woman? and when do women ever forgive the woman's greatness? and
when does every cur fail to snarl at the life that is higher than its
fellows? It is by the very genius in her that you have had such power to
wound, such power to blight and to destroy. By so long as her name shall
be spoken, so long will the wrong you have done her cling round it, to
make it meet for reproach. A mere woman dies, and her woe and her shame
die with her, and the earth covers her and them; but such shelter is
denied for ever to the woman who has genius and fame; long after she is
dead she will lie out on common soil, naked and unhouselled, for all the
winds to blow on her and all the carrion birds to tear."