A few tears rose to Hortense’s eyes, and Lisbeth drank them with her eyes as a cat laps milk.

This is the story of their honeymoon—­the tale will perhaps not be lost on some artists.

Intellectual work, labor in the upper regions of mental effort, is one of the grandest achievements of man.  That which deserves real glory in Art—­for by Art we must understand every creation of the mind—­is courage above all things—­a sort of courage of which the vulgar have no conception, and which has never perhaps been described till now.

Driven by the dreadful stress of poverty, goaded by Lisbeth, and kept by her in blinders, as a horse is, to hinder it from seeing to the right and left of its road, lashed on by that hard woman, the personification of Necessity, a sort of deputy Fate, Wenceslas, a born poet and dreamer, had gone on from conception to execution, and overleaped, without sounding it, the gulf that divides these two hemispheres of Art.  To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful occupation.  It is like smoking a magic cigar or leading the life of a courtesan who follows her own fancy.  The work then floats in all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of conception, with the fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic juices of a fruit enjoyed in anticipation.

The man who can sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty.  But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother’s heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in painting to every memory, in music to every heart!—­This is the task of execution.  The hand must be ready at every instant to come forward and obey the brain.  But the brain has no more a creative power at command than love has a perennial spring.

The habit of creativeness, the indefatigable love of motherhood which makes a mother—­that miracle of nature which Raphael so perfectly understood—­the maternity of the brain, in short, which is so difficult to develop, is lost with prodigious ease.  Inspiration is the opportunity of genius.  She does not indeed dance on the razor’s edge, she is in the air and flies away with the suspicious swiftness of a crow; she wears no scarf by which the poet can clutch her; her hair is a flame; she vanishes like the lovely rose and white flamingo, the sportsman’s despair.  And work, again, is a weariful struggle, alike dreaded and delighted in by these lofty and powerful natures who are often broken by it.  A great poet of our day has said in speaking of this overwhelming labor,