MARTELLUS [as before] Ha!

ARJILLAX [stung] Why do you laugh, you who have come empty-handed, and, it seems, empty-headed?

ECRASIA [rising indignantly] Oh, shame!  You dare disparage Martellus, twenty times your master.

ACIS.  Be quiet, will you [he seizes her shoulders and thrusts her back into her seat].

MARTELLUS.  Let him disparage his fill, Ecrasia. [Sitting up] My poor Arjillax, I too had this dream.  I too found one day that my images of loveliness had become vapid, uninteresting, tedious, a waste of time and material.  I too lost my desire to model limbs, and retained only my interest in heads and faces.  I, too, made busts of ancients; but I had not your courage:  I made them in secret, and hid them from you all.

ARJILLAX [jumping down from the altar behind Martellus in his surprise and excitement] You made busts of ancients!  Where are they, man?  Will you be talked out of your inspiration by Ecrasia and the fools who imagine she speaks with authority?  Let us have them all set up beside mine in the theatre.  I have opened the way for you; and you see I am none the worse.

MARTELLUS.  Impossible.  They are all smashed. [He rises, laughing].

ALL.  Smashed!

ARJILLAX.  Who smashed them?

MARTELLUS.  I did.  That is why I laughed at you just now.  You will smash yours before you have completed a dozen of them. [He goes to the end of the altar and sits down beside the Newly Born].

ARJILLAX.  But why?

MARTELLUS.  Because you cannot give them life.  A live ancient is better than a dead statue. [He takes the Newly Born on his knee:  she is flattered and voluptuously responsive].  Anything alive is better than anything that is only pretending to be alive. [To Arjillax] Your disillusion with your works of beauty is only the beginning of your disillusion with images of all sorts.  As your hand became more skilful and your chisel cut deeper, you strove to get nearer and nearer to truth and reality, discarding the fleeting fleshly lure, and making images of the mind that fascinates to the end.  But how can so noble an inspiration be satisfied with any image, even an image of the truth?  In the end the intellectual conscience that tore you away from the fleeting in art to the eternal must tear you away from art altogether, because art is false and life alone is true.

THE NEWLY BORN [flings her arms round his neck and kisses him enthusiastically].

MARTELLUS [rises; carries her to the curved bench on his left; deposits her beside Strephon as if she were his overcoat; and continues without the least change of tone] Shape it as you will, marble remains marble, and the graven image an idol.  As I have broken my idols, and cast away my chisel and modelling tools, so will you too break these busts of yours.

ARJILLAX.  Never.