The place of meeting was in the palatial, but somewhat faded and gloomy apartment of an eminent member of the aesthetic body.  It was no more formal an occasion than one of those weekly receptions, common among the foreign residents of Rome, at which pleasant people—­or disagreeable ones, as the case may be—­encounter one another with little ceremony.

If anywise interested in art, a man must be difficult to please who cannot find fit companionship among a crowd of persons, whose ideas and pursuits all tend towards the general purpose of enlarging the world’s stock of beautiful productions.

One of the chief causes that make Rome the favorite residence of artists—­their ideal home which they sigh for in advance, and are so loath to migrate from, after once breathing its enchanted air—­is, doubtless, that they there find themselves in force, and are numerous enough to create a congenial atmosphere.  In every other clime they are isolated strangers; in this land of art, they are free citizens.

Not that, individually, or in the mass, there appears to be any large stock of mutual affection among the brethren of the chisel and the pencil.  On the contrary, it will impress the shrewd observer that the jealousies and petty animosities, which the poets of our day have flung aside, still irritate and gnaw into the hearts of this kindred class of imaginative men.  It is not difficult to suggest reasons why this should be the fact.  The public, in whose good graces lie the sculptor’s or the painter’s prospects of success, is infinitely smaller than the public to which literary men make their appeal.  It is composed of a very limited body of wealthy patrons; and these, as the artist well knows, are but blind judges in matters that require the utmost delicacy of perception.  Thus, success in art is apt to become partly an affair of intrigue; and it is almost inevitable that even a gifted artist should look askance at his gifted brother’s fame, and be chary of the good word that might help him to sell still another statue or picture.  You seldom hear a painter heap generous praise on anything in his special line of art; a sculptor never has a favorable eye for any marble but his own.

Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are conscious of a social warmth from each other’s presence and contiguity.  They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the unsympathizing cities of their native land.  For the sake of such brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.