Apart from these stories, they never talked of the future. They
delighted most either in mocking imaginations of destruction, or in
sentimental, fine marionette-shows of the past. It was a sentimental
delight to reconstruct the world of Goethe at Weimar, or of Schiller
and poverty and faithful love, or to see again Jean Jacques in his
quakings, or Voltaire at Ferney, or Frederick the Great reading his own
poetry.
They talked together for hours, of literature and sculpture and
painting, amusing themselves with Flaxman and Blake and Fuseli, with
tenderness, and with Feuerbach and Bocklin. It would take them a
life-time, they felt to live again, IN PETTO, the lives of the great
artists. But they preferred to stay in the eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries.
They talked in a mixture of languages. The ground-work was French, in
either case. But he ended most of his sentences in a stumble of English
and a conclusion of German, she skilfully wove herself to her end in
whatever phrase came to her.
Pages:
916
917
918
919
920
921
922
923
924
925
926
927
928
929
930
931
932
933
934
935
936
937
938
939
940