“Indeed?” asked Ptolemy in a drawling tone, at the same time casting a glance of astonishment at the blind man’s powerful figure and well-formed, intellectual face.  Then he went on eagerly:  “I shall scarcely be wrong in the inference that you, the creator of the Fig-eater, had experienced a far-reaching mental change before your unfortunate loss of sight?”

“I had to struggle hard,” replied Hermon, “but I probably owe the success of the Demeter to the circumstance that I found a model whose mind and nature correspond with those of the goddess to a rare degree.”

The monarch shook his fair head, and protested in a tone of positive superior knowledge:  “As to the model, however well selected it may be, it was not well chosen for this work, far less for you.  I have watched your battle against beauty in behalf of truth, and rejoiced, though I often saw you and your little band of young disciples shoot beyond the mark.  You brought something new, whose foundation seemed to me sound, and on which further additions might be erected.  When the excrescences fell off, I thought, this Hermon, his shadow Soteles, and the others who follow him will perhaps open new paths to the declining art which is constantly going back to former days.  Our time will become the point of departure of a new art.  But for that very reason, let me confess it, I regret to see you fall back from your bold advance.  You now claim for your work that it cleaves strictly to Nature, because the model is taken from life itself.  It does not become me to doubt this, yet the stamp of divinity which your Demeter bears is found in no mortal woman.  Understand me correctly!  This is certainly no departure from the truth, for the ideal often deserves this lofty name better than anything the visible world offers to the eye; but hitherto you have done honour to another truth.  If I comprehend your art aright, its essence is opposed to the addition of superhuman dignity and beauty, with which you, or the model you used, strove to ennoble and deify your Demeter.  Admirably as you succeeded in doing so, it forces your work out of the sphere of reality, whose boundary I never before saw you cross by a single inch.  Whether this occurred unconsciously to you in an hour of mental ecstasy, or whether you felt that you still lacked the means to represent the divine, and therefore returned to the older methods, I do not venture to decide.  But at the first examination of your work I was conscious of one thing:  It means for you a revolution, a rupture with your former aspirations; and as—­I willingly confess it—­you had been marvellously successful, it would have driven you, had your sight been spared, out of your own course and into the arms of the ancients, perhaps to your material profit, but scarcely to the advantage of art, which needs a renewal of its vital energies.”

“Let me assure you, my lord,” Hermon protested, “that had I remained able to continue to create, the success of the Demeter would never, never have rendered me faithless to the conviction and method of creation which I believed right; nay, before losing my sight, my whole soul was absorbed in a new work which would have permitted me to remain wholly and completely within the bounds of reality.”