"
"What! Only water--without shore, or people, or ships?"
"I remember a picture with absolutely nothing but water, only a
spar, or a mast floating on it."
"There, you see!" she cried in triumph. "That broken mast is a trick
of the artist. There lies the story. You instantly think of a
wrecked ship; you see men, catastrophes, weeping widows and
sweethearts; the spar becomes the central point of the picture, and
you forget all about the sea. Moreover, the ancients, who surely had
an eye for all that is grand and beautiful, they did not know either
what to do with the sea. They were a magnificent race, healthy-
minded realists--and kept strictly to the evidences of their senses
without adding anything transcendental. The sea only appealed to
their ear. Homer's adjectives for the sea are only expressive of
sound--the resounding, the jubilant, the loud-rushing; hardly more
than once does he allude to the gloomy or the wine-colored sea."
"You have your classics at your fingers' ends, like any
philologist."
"That need not surprise you. With regard to the really beautiful, I
have neither pride nor prejudice. Even the fact that the common herd
of the reading public has made a point of praising him for a hundred
years does not prevent me from enjoying a true poet.
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