to come back, he would recommend you to give it up. I am half Italian
and half French, and, as a whole, a Yankee. What sort of a Greek should
I make? I think the Judas is a capital idea for a statue. Much obliged
to you, madame, for the suggestion. What an insidious little scoundrel
one might make of him, sitting there nursing his money-bag and his
treachery! There can be a great deal of expression in a pendulous nose,
my dear sir, especially when it is cast in green bronze."

"Very likely," said Roderick. "But it is not the sort of expression I
care for. I care only for perfect beauty. There it is, if you want to
know it! That 's as good a profession of faith as another. In future, so
far as my things are not positively beautiful, you may set them down as
failures. For me, it 's either that or nothing. It 's against the taste
of the day, I know; we have really lost the faculty to understand beauty
in the large, ideal way. We stand like a race with shrunken muscles,
staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted. But I
don't hesitate to proclaim it--I mean to lift them again! I mean to go
in for big things; that 's my notion of my art. I mean to do things
that will be simple and vast and infinite. You 'll see if they won't be
infinite! Excuse me if I brag a little; all those Italian fellows in the
Renaissance used to brag. There was a sensation once common, I am sure,
in the human breast--a kind of religious awe in the presence of a marble
image newly created and expressing the human type in superhuman purity.
When Phidias and Praxiteles had their statues of goddesses unveiled in
the temples of the AEgean, don't you suppose there was a passionate
beating of hearts, a thrill of mysterious terror? I mean to bring it
back; I mean to thrill the world again! I mean to produce a Juno that
will make you tremble, a Venus that will make you swoon!"

"So that when we come and see you," said Madame Grandoni, "we must be