And the English lady
who said of some one that "being an artist, you know, of course he
had a great deal of poetical feeling." And the man who was sketching
and said he had a very good eye for colour in the light, but would I
be good enough to tell him what colour was best for the shadows.
"An amateur," he said, "might do very decent things in water-colour,
but oils require genius."
So I said: "What is genius?"
"Millet's picture of the Angelus sold for 700,000 francs. Now that,"
he said, "is genius."
After which I was very civil to him.
At Bellinzona a man told me that one of the two towers was built by
the Visconti and the other by Julius Caesar, a hundred years earlier.
So, poor old Mrs. Barratt at Langar could conceive no longer time
than a hundred years. The Trojan war did not last ten years, but ten
years was as big a lie as Homer knew.
We went over the Albula Pass to St. Moritz in two diligences and
could not settle which was tonic and which was dominant; but the
carriage behind us was the relative minor.
There was a picture in the dining-room but we could not get near
enough to see it; we thought it must be either Christ disputing with
the Doctors or Louis XVI saying farewell to his family--or something
of that sort.
The Sacro Monte at Varese
The Sacro Monte is a kind of ecclesiastical Rosherville Gardens,
eminently the place to spend a happy day.
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