Constantine Logotheti had at least two reasons for not going out to

Versailles as soon as Mrs. Rushmore signified her desire to know him.

In the first place he was 'somebody,' and an important part of being

'somebody' is to keep the fact well before the eyes of other people. He

was altogether too great a personage to be at the beck and call of

every one who wanted to know him. Secondly, he did not wish Margaret to

think that he was running after her, for the very good reason that he

meant to do so with the least possible delay.

Lushington, who was really both sensitive and imaginative, used to tell

Margaret that he was a realist. Logotheti, who was by nature, talent

and education a thorough materialist, loved to believe that he

possessed both a rich imagination and the gift of true sentiment.

Margaret had delighted him at first sight, though he was hard to

please, and though she was not a great beauty. She appealed directly to

that love of life for its own sake which was always the strength, the

genius and the snare of the Greek people, and which is not extinct in

their modern descendants. Logotheti certainly had plenty of it, and his

first impression, when he had met Margaret Donne, was that he had met

his natural mate. There was nothing in the very least psychological

about the sensation, and yet it was not the result of a purely physical

attraction. It brought with it a satisfaction of artistic taste that

was an unmarred pleasure in itself.

True art has gone much further in deifying humanity than in humanising

divinity. The Hermes of Olympia is a man made into a god; no Christian

artist has ever done a tenth as well in presenting the image of God

made Man. When imagination soars towards an invisible world it loses

love of life as it flies higher, till it ends in glorifying death as

the only means of reaching heaven; and in doing that it has often

descended to a gross realism that would have revolted the Greeks--to

the materialism of anatomical preparations that make one think of the

dissecting-room, if one has ever been there.

Love of genuine art is the best sort of love of life, and the really

great artists have always been tremendously vital creatures. So-called

artistic people who are sickly or merely under-vitalised generally go

astray after strange gods; or, at the best, they admire works of art

for the sake of certain pleasing, or sad, or even unhealthy

associations which these call up.

Logotheti came of a race which, through being temporarily isolated from

modern progress, has not grown old with it. For it seems pretty sure

that progress means, with many other things, the survival of the unfit

and the transmission of unfitness to a generation of old babies; but

where men are not disinfected, sterilised, fed on preserved carrion and

treated with hypodermics from the cradle to the grave, the good old law

of nature holds its own and the weak ones die young, while the strong

fight for life and are very much alive while they live.




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