Here is the story of that honeymoon in brief; the account will perhaps not be lost on artists.
Intellectual work, the pursuit of achievement in the high regions of the mind, is one of the greatest of human endeavours. What most deserves glory in art (for in that word we must include all mental creativity) is, above all, courage, a courage of which ordinary people have no idea and which, perhaps for the first time, is revealed here.
Driven by the terrible pressure of poverty, kept by Bette in a situation like that of a horse kept blinkered to prevent it from seeing to the right or left of its path, goaded on by that strict old maid, the personification of Necessity, a kind of underling of Fate, Wenceslas, a born poet and dreamer, had passed from the conception of a work to its execution, crossing the abysses that separate these two hemispheres of art without taking any account of the leaps.
To think, to dream, to conceive beautiful works of art, is a delightful occupation. It is like smoking magic cigars, like living the life of a courtesan who heeds only her own caprices. The work then appears in all its initial charm, in the wild delight of its invention, with its flower-like colours and perfumes and the sweet-tasting juices of a fruit savoured in anticipation. Such are the pleasures of conception.
He who can describe his plan in words is already deemed to be an extraordinary man. All writers and artists have this ability. But to produce! To bring to birth! To work hard at rearing the child, to put it to bed every night well-fed with milk, to kiss it every morning with the inexhaustible love of a mother, to lick it clean, to dress it a hundred times in the prettiest of jackets which it tears again and again; but not to be discouraged by the convulsions of this mad life and to turn it into the living masterpiece which speaks to all eyes in sculpture, to all minds in literature, to all memories in painting, to all hearts in music, that is the task of execution! The hand must be ready at every moment to work in obedience to the mind. And the mind is not creative to order, any more than love flows uninterruptedly.
The habit of creation, the indefatigable maternal love which makes a mother (that natural masterpiece so well understood by Raphael), in short, that intellectual maternity which is so difficult to acquire, is remarkably easy to lose. Inspiration gives genius its opportunity. It runs, not on a razor’s edge, but on the very air and takes wing with the quick alarm of a crow. It wears no scarf that the poet can grasp; its hair is a flame; it flies away like those beautiful pink and white flamingoes that are the despair of huntsmen. So work is a wearing struggle that is both feared and loved by the fine and powerful constitutions that are often shattered by it. A great poet of our own day said, speaking of this appalling toil, ‘I begin it with despair and leave it with sorrow.’
Let the ignorant be informed! If the artist does not throw himself into his work, like Curtius* into the gulf beneath the Forum, like a soldier against a fortress, without hesitation, and if, in that crater, he does not work like a miner under a fall of rock, if, in short, he envisages the difficulties instead of conquering them one by one, following the example of lovers in fairy-tales who, to win their princesses, struggle against recurring enchantments, the work remains unfinished, it expires in the studio, where production remains impossible and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own talent.
Rossini, a genius akin to Raphael, affords a striking example in the contrast between the poverty of his youth and the affluence of his maturity.
That is the reason for the same reward, the same triumph, the same laurel wreath being granted to great poets and great generals.
Wenceslas, by nature a dreamer, had expended so much energy in producing, learning, and working under Lisbeth’s despotic command, that love and happiness brought a reaction. His true character reappeared. Laziness and indifference, Slavonic weakness of character, regained possession of the receptive pathways of his heart, from which the schoolmaster’s rod had banished them.