He
cannot spare the time from his work, and how can he afford to humble
himself and go a-masquerading! I was ready to give my life once and
for all, but I could not degrade it in detail. Besides, there is
something indescribably paltry in a stockbroker's tactics, who runs on
errands for some insipid affected woman; all this disgusts an artist.
Love in the abstract is not enough for a great man in poverty; he has
need of its utmost devotion. The frivolous creatures who spend their
lives in trying on cashmeres, or make themselves into clothes-pegs to
hang the fashions from, exact the devotion which is not theirs to
give; for them, love means the pleasure of ruling and not of obeying.
She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow
wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and
happiness are centered. Ambitious men need those Oriental women whose
whole thought is given to the study of their requirements; for
unhappiness means for them the incompatibility of their means with
their desires. But I, who took myself for a man of genius, must needs
feel attracted by these very she-coxcombs. So, as I cherished ideas so
different from those generally received; as I wished to scale the
heavens without a ladder, was possessed of wealth that could not
circulate, and of knowledge so wide and so imperfectly arranged and
digested that it overtaxed my memory; as I had neither relations nor
friends in the midst of this lonely and ghastly desert, a desert of
paving stones, full of animation, life, and thought, wherein every one
is worse than inimical, indifferent to wit; I made a very natural if
foolish resolve, which required such unknown impossibilities, that my
spirits rose.
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