# Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 11

XI
One day on entering Roderick's lodging (not the modest rooms on the Ripetta which he had first oc cupied, but a much ampler apartment on the Corso) Rowland found a letter on the table addressed to himself. It was from Roderick and consisted of but three lines. "I'm gone to Frascati—for meditation. If I 'm not at home on Friday you had better join me." On Friday he was still absent, and Rowland went out to Frascati. Here he found his friend living at the inn and spending his days, according to his own account, lying under the trees of Villa Mondragone and reading Ariosto. He was melancholy, almost morose; his subjects of "meditation" seemed not to have been happy. Nothing especially pertinent to our narrative had passed between the two young men since Mrs. Light's ball save a few words bearing on a passage of that entertainment. Rowland had informed Roderick the next day that he had told Miss Light of his engagement, and had added: "I don't know whether you 'll thank me, but it 's my duty to let you know it. Miss Light perhaps has already done so."
Roderick stared hard an instant, his colour rising. "Why should I not thank you? I 'm not ashamed of my engagement."
"As you had not spoken of it yourself I thought you might have a reason for not having it known."
​"A man does n't gossip about such a matter with strangers," Roderick rejoined; and the ring of irritation was in his voice.
"With strangers—no!" said Rowland, smiling. Roderick continued his work; but, after a moment, turning round with a frown, "If you supposed I had a reason for being silent, pray why should you have spoken?" he demanded.
"I did n't speak idly, my dear man. I weighed the matter first, and promised myself to let you know immediately afterwards. It seemed to me Miss Light had better have it in her head that your faith and honour are pledged."
"The Cavaliere then has put it into yours that I'm making love to her?"
"No; in that case I should n't have spoken to her first."
"Do you mean then that she 's making love to me?"
"This is what I mean," said Rowland after a pause. "She finds you fitfully but unmistakeably interesting, and she 's pleased, even though she may feign indifference, at your finding her more continuously so. I said to myself that it might save her some little waste of imagination to know without delay that you 're not at liberty to become indefinitely interested in other women."
"You seem to have taken the measure of my liberty with extraordinary minuteness," Roderick observed.
"You must do me justice then. I 'm the cause of your separation from Miss Garland, the cause of ​your being exposed to influences and opportunities here that she hardly even dreams of. How could I ever meet her again," Rowland continued with much warmth of tone, "if at the end of it all she should find herself short?"
"I had no idea she had made such an impression on you. You 're too anxious and, I really think, too zealous. I take it she did n't really request you to look after her affairs."
"If anything happens to you I 'm accountable. You must understand that."
"That 's a view of the situation I can't accept—in your own interest no less than in mine. It can only make us both very uncomfortable. I know all I owe you; I feel it: you know that. But I 'm not a small boy nor a country lout any longer, and whatever I do I do with my eyes open. When I do well the merit 's my own; if I do ill the fault 's my own. The idea that I make you nervous is not to be borne. Dedicate your nerves to some better cause, and believe that if Miss Garland and I have a quarrel we shall settle it between ourselves."
Rowland had found himself wondering shortly before whether possibly his brilliant young friend were without a conscience; now it dimly occurred to him that he was without that indispensable aid to completeness, a feeling heart. Rowland, as we have already intimated, was a man of moral passion, and no small part of that motive force had been spent in this adventure. There had been from the first no protestations of friendship on either side, but Rowland had implicitly offered everything that belongs to ​friendship, and Roderick had to every appearance as deliberately accepted it. Rowland indeed had taken an exquisite satisfaction in his companion's easy, inexpressive assent to his interest in him. "Here 's an uncommonly fine thing," he said to himself; "a nature all unconsciously grateful, a man in whom friendship does the thing that love alone generally has the credit of—knocks the bottom out of pride." His reflective judgement of his companion, as time went on, had indulged in a great many irrepressible vagaries; but his affection, his sense of something in the other's whole personality that appealed to his tenderness and charmed his understanding, had never for an instant faltered. He listened to Roderick's last words, and then he smiled as he rarely smiled—with bitterness.
"I don't at all like your telling me I'm meddlesome. If I had n't been meddlesome I should never have cared a fig for you."
Roderick flushed deeply and thrust his modelling-tool up to the handle into the clay. "Say it outright—as you want to. You 've been an awful fool to believe in me."
"I don't want to say it, and you don't honestly believe I do," said Rowland, all in patience. "It seems to me I 'm really very good-natured even to reply to such nonsense."
Roderick sat down, crossed his arms and fixed his eyes on the floor. Rowland looked at him for some moments; it seemed to him that he had never so clearly perceived him as all strangely and endlessly mixed—with his abundance and his scarcity, his power ​to charm and his power to hurt, the possibilities of his egotism, the uncertainties of his temper, the delicacies of his mind. It would have made him quite sick, however, to think that on the whole the values in such a spirit were not much larger than the voids, and he was so far from having ceased to believe in it that he felt just now more than ever that a fine moral agitation, adding a zest to life, is the inevitable portion of those who, themselves unendowed, yet share romantically the pursuits of the inspired. Rowland, who had not a grain of genius either to make one say he was an interested reasoner or to enable one to feel that he could afford a dangerous theory or two, adhered to his conviction of the essential salubrity of genius. Suddenly he felt a rush of pity for his companion, whose beautiful faculty of production was thus a double-edged instrument, susceptible of being dealt in back-handed blows at its possessor. Genius was priceless, beneficent, divine, but it was also at its hours capricious, sinister, cruel; and natures ridden by it, accordingly, were alternately very enviable and very helpless. It was not the first time he had had a sense of Roderick's standing passive in the clutch of his temperament. It had shaken him as yet but with a half good-humoured wantonness; but henceforth possibly it meant to handle him more roughly. These were not times, therefore, for a friend to have a short patience.
"When you err you say the fault 's your own," he said at last. "It 's because your faults are your own that I heed them."
Rowland's voice, when he spoke with feeling, had ​an extraordinary amenity. Roderick sat staring a moment longer at the floor, then he sprang up and laid his hand affectionately on his friend's shoulder. "You 're the best man in the world," he said, "and I 'm a vile brute. Only," he added, in a moment, "you don't understand me!" And he looked at him out of such bottomless depths as might have formed the element of a shining merman who should be trying, comparatively near shore, to signal to a ruminating ox.
Rowland's own face was now a confession of his probably being indeed too heavy to float in such waters. "What is it now? Explain."
"Oh, I can't explain!" cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. "I 've only one way of expressing my deepest feelings—it 's this." And he swung his tool. He stood looking at the half-wrought clay for a moment and then flung the instrument down. "And even this half the time plays me false!"
Rowland felt that his irritation had not subsided, but he nevertheless risked, for a decent consistency's sake, the words he had had on his conscience from the beginning. "We must do what we can and be thankful," he said. "And let me assure you of this—that the practice of your talent will never see you out of one kind of difficulty only just to expose you to another."
Roderick pressed his hand to his forehead with vehemence, and then shook it in the air despairingly; a gesture that had of late become frequent with him. "No, no, it 's no use; you don't understand me. But I don't blame you. You can't!"
"You think it will then?" said Rowland, to whom it had suddenly occurred that he sincerely might.
​"I think that when you expect a man to produce beautiful and wonderful works of art you ought to allow him a certain freedom of action, you ought to give him a long rope, you ought to let him follow his fancy and look for his material wherever he thinks he may find it. A mother can't nurse her child unless she follows a certain diet; an artist can't bring his visions to maturity unless he has a certain experience. You demand of us to be imaginative, and you deny us the things that feed the imagination. In labour we must be as passionate as the inspired sibyl; in life we must be as regular as the postman and as satisfactory as the cook. It won't do, you know, my dear chap. When you 've an artist to deal with you must take him as he is, good and bad together. I don't say they 're pleasant creatures to know or easy creatures to live with; I don't say they satisfy themselves any better than other people. I only say that if you want them to produce you must let them conceive. If you want a bird to sing you must n't cover up its cage. Shoot them, the poor devils, drown them, exterminate them, if you will, in the interest of public morality: it may be morality would gain—I dare say it would. But if you suffer them to live, let them live on their own terms and according to their own inexorable needs!"
"I 've no wish whatever either to shoot you or to drown you," Rowland perhaps a little infelicitously laughed. "Why defend yourself with such very big guns against a warning offered you altogether in the interest of your freest development? Do you really mean that you 've an inexorable need of an intimate relation with Miss Light?—a relation as to the felicity ​of which there may be differences of opinion, but which can't, at best, under the circumstances, be called innocent. Your last summer's adventures were more so! As for the terms on which you 're to live, I had an idea you had arranged them otherwise."
"I've arranged nothing thank God! I don't pretend to arrange. I 'm young and ardent and inquisitive, and I 'm interested in that young woman. That 's enough. I shall go as far as the interest leads me. I 'm not afraid. Your genuine artist may be sometimes half a madman, but he 's never even half a coward!"
"I see; it's a speculation. But suppose that in your speculation you should come to grief artistically as well as—what shall I say?—more intimately."
"Well then, I must take life as it comes—I can't always be arranging grand bargains. If I 'm to fizzle out, the sooner I know it the better. Sometimes I half suspect it. But let me at least go out and reconnoitre for the enemy, and not sit here waiting for him, cudgelling my brains for ideas that won't come!"
Do what he would, Rowland could not think of Roderick's theory of the fell play of experiment, especially as applied in the case under discussion, as any thing but a pernicious illusion. But he saw it was vain to discuss the matter, for inclination was powerfully on his friend's side. He laid his two hands on his shoulders, held him hard, with troubled eyes, then shook a mournful head and turned away.
"I can't work any more," said Roderick. "You put an end to that. I'll go and stroll on the Pincian." And he tossed aside his blouse and prepared himself for ​the street. As he was arranging his necktie before the glass something occurred to him that made him thoughtful. He stopped a few moments later, as they were going out, with his hand on the door-knob. "You did from your own point of view an indiscreet thing, you know, to tell Miss Light of my engagement."
Rowland faced him in a manner which was partly a protest, but also partly a recognition.
"If she's the particular sort of vampire you seem to take her for," Roderick added, "you've only given her an incentive."
"And that's the girl you propose to devote yourself to?" his companion cried.
"Oh, I don't say it, mind! I only say—well, I say that the next time you mean to render me a service it will be safest for you to give me notice beforehand!"
It was perfectly characteristic of Roderick that a fortnight later he should have let his friend know that he depended upon him for society at Frascati as freely as if no irritating topic had ever been discussed between them. Rowland thought him generous, and he had at any rate a liberal faculty of forgetting that he had given you any reason to be displeased with him. It was equally characteristic of Rowland that he complied with his friend's summons without a moment's hesitation. His cousin Cecilia had once told him that he was too credulous to have a right to be kind. She put the case with too little favour, or too much, as the reader chooses; it is certain at least that he gave others, as a general thing, the benefit of any doubt, ​reserving for himself the detriment. Nothing happened, however, to suggest to him that he was deluded in thinking that Roderick's secondary impulses were the prompt saving ones, and that his nature as a mixed whole tasted distinctly more of its sweet than of its bitter parts. The wind had dropped, at all events, for the time, round the young man's head, even if the cloud had not lifted; he was lazy, listless and detached, but he had never been so softly submissive. Winter had begun by the calendar, yet the weather was divinely mild, and the companions took long slow strolls on the hills and lounged away the mornings in the villas. The villas at Frascati make infinitely for peace and are rich in the romantic note. Roderick, as he had said, was meditating, and if a masterpiece was to come of his meditations Rowland could hold his breath for it with the best will in the world. But Roderick let him know from the first that he was in a miserably sterile mood, and, cudgel his brains as he would, could think of nothing that would serve for the statue he was to make for Mr. Leavenworth.
"It 's worse out here than in Rome," he said, "for here I'm face to face with the dead blank of my mind. There I could n't think of anything either, but there I found things that helped me to live without thought." This was as free a renewed tribute to forbidden fruit as could have hoped to pass; it seemed indeed to Rowland surprisingly free—a lively instance of his friend's disassociated manner of looking, as might have been said, at the time of day. Roderick was silent sometimes for hours, with a vague anxiety in his face and a new fold between his even eyebrows; at ​other times he restlessly talked, though in a fitful, musing monologue. Rowland could have felt it his duty at moments to offer to feel his pulse; he wondered if he had n't symptoms of fever. Roderick had taken a great fancy to Villa Mondragone, and used to pay it florid compliments as they strolled, in the winter sunshine, on the great terrace which looks toward Tivoli and the iridescent Sabine hills. He carried his volume of Ariosto in his pocket and took it out every now and then to spout passages to his companion. He was as a general thing very little of a reader; but at intervals he would take a fancy to one of the classics and nose over it as for the flowers. He had picked up Italian without study, and gave it a wonderful sound, though in reading aloud he ruined the sense of half his admirations and felicities. Rowland, who pronounced badly but understood everything, once said to him that Ariosto was not the poet for a man of his craft; a sculptor should above all make a companion of Dante. So he gave him a fine old copy of the Inferno, a high rarity, one of his portable treasures, and advised him to make it familiar. Roderick took it responsively—perhaps he should find it tonic; but he had renounced it the next day: he had found it horribly depressing.
"A sculptor should model as Dante writes—you're right there," he said. "But when his genius is in eclipse Dante 's a dreadfully smoky lamp. By what perversity of fate," he went on, "has it come about that I find myself a sculptor at all? A sculptor 's such a confoundedly special genius; there are so few subjects he can treat, so few things in life that ​bear upon his work, so few moods in which he himself is inclined to it." (It may be noted that Rowland had heard him a dozen times affirm the flat reverse of all this.) "If I had only been a painter—a little, quiet, docile, matter-of-fact painter like our friend Singleton—I should only have to open my Ariosto here to find a subject, to find colour and attitudes, stuffs and composition; I should only have to look up from the page at that mouldy old fountain against the blue sky, at that cypress alley wandering away like a procession of priests in couples, at the crags and hollows of the Sabines there, to find my picture begun. Best of all would it be to be Ariosto himself or one of his brotherhood. Then everything in nature would give you a hint, and every form of beauty be part of your stock. You would n't have to look at things only to say—with tears of rage half the time—'Oh yes, it's wonderfully pretty, but what the devil can I do with it?' But a sculptor now, come! That 's a pretty trade for a fellow who has got his living to make, and yet is so damnably constituted that he can't work, on the one hand, unless the trumpet really sounds, and can't play, on the other, either at working or at anything else, while he's waiting for its call. You can't model the serge-coated cypresses, nor those mouldering old Tritons and all the sunny sadness of that dried-up fountain; you can't put the light into marble—the lovely, caressing, consenting Italian light that you get so much of for nothing. Say that a dozen times in his life a man has a completely plastic vision—a vision in which the imagination recognises a real, valid ​subject and the subject reacts on the imagination. It 's a remunerative rate of production, and the in tervals are convenient!"
One morning as the young men were at their ease on the sun-warmed grass at the foot of one of the slanting pines of the Villa, Roderick gave himself up to a free and beautiful consideration of the possible mischances of genius. "What if the watch should run down," he asked, "and you should lose the key? What if you should wake up some morning and find it stopped—inexorably, appallingly stopped? Such things have been, and the poor devils to whom they happened have had to grin and bear it. The whole matter of genius is a mystery. It bloweth where it listeth, and we know nothing of its mechanism. If it gets out of order we can't mend it; if it breaks down altogether we can't set it going again. We must let it choose its own pace and hold our breath lest it should lose its balance. It 's dealt out in different doses, in big cups and little, and when you have consumed your portion it 's as naïf to ask for more as it was for Oliver Twist to ask for more porridge. Lucky for you if you 've got one of the big cups; we drink them down in the dark and we can't tell their size until we tip them up and hear the last gurgle. Those of some men last for life; those of others for a couple of years. I say, what are you grinning at?" he went on as in the best possible faith. "Nothing is more common than for an artist who has set out on his journey on a high-stepping horse to find himself all of a sudden dismounted and invited to go his way on foot. You can number them ​by the thousand—the people of two or three successes; the poor fellows whose candle burnt out in a night. Some of them groped their way along without it, some of them gave themselves up for blind and sat down by the wayside to beg. Who shall say that I am not one of these? Who shall assure me that my credit is for an unlimited sum? Nothing proves it, and I never claimed it; or if I did, I did so in the mere boyish joy of shaking off the dust of my desert. If you believed so, my dear fellow, you did it at your own risk. What am I, what are the best of us, but a desperate experiment? Do I more or less idiotically succeed—do I more or less sublimely fail? I seem to myself to be the last circumstance it depends on. I'm prepared, at any rate, for a fizzle. It won't be a tragedy, simply because I sha'n't assist at it. The end of my work shall be the end of my life. When I 've played my last card I shall cease to care for the game. I 'm not making vulgar threats of the dagger or the bowl; for destiny, I trust, won't make me further ridiculous by forcing me publicly to fumble with them. But I have a conviction that if the hour strikes here," and he tapped his forehead, "I shall disappear, dissolve, be carried off in a something as pretty, let us hope, as the drifted spray of a fountain; that 's what I shall have been. For the past ten days I 've had the vision of some such fate perpetually swimming before me. My mind is like a dead calm in the tropics, and my imagination as motionless as the blighted ship in the 'Ancient Mariner'!"
Rowland listened to this outpouring, as he often ​had occasion to listen to Roderick's flights of eloquence, with a number of mental restrictions. Both in gravity and in gaiety he said more than he meant, and you did him simple justice if you privately concluded that neither the glow of purpose nor the chill of despair was of so intense a strain as his gift for expression implied. The moods of an artist, his exaltations and depressions, Rowland had often said to himself, were like the pen-flourishes a writing-master makes in the air when he begins to set his copy. He may bespatter you with ink, he may hit you in the eye, but he writes a magnificent hand. It was nevertheless true that at present poor Roderick showed grave symptoms of a general breakage of his springs. As to genius held or not held on the precarious tenure he had sketched, Rowland had to confess himself too much of an outsider to argue. He secretly but heavily sighed; he wished his companion had had a trifle more of little Sam Singleton's pedestrian patience. But then was Sam Singleton a man of genius? He answered that such questions struck him as idle, even inane; that the proof of the pudding was in the eating; that he knew nothing about bringing dead things back to life again, but that you might sometimes pull a man out of bed who would n't get up. "Don't worry about your mood," he prosaically pleaded, "and don't believe there 's any calm so utter that your own lungs can't ruffle it with a breeze. If you've pressing business to attend to don't wait to settle the name and work out the pedigree of the agent you despatch on it: tumble to work somehow and see what it looks like afterwards."
​"I 've a prejudice against tumbling, anywhere," Roderick rejoined; "the pleasure of motion for me is in seeing where I go. If I don't see I don't move—that is I but jump up and down in the same place. In other words I 'm an ass unless I 'm an angel. You should talk to Gloriani: he's an ass all the while, only an ass for a circus, who can stand on his hind legs and fire off pistols. But you're right," he added after a while; "this is unprofitable talk, and it makes my head ache. I shall take a nap and see if I can dream of a bright idea or two."