Kohle's pale face never moved a muscle. He slowly drank a few drops of wine from his glass, and then said, calmly:
"You forget, my dear godfather, that the worm you cite as your model has at least the excuse that it spins silk. If you could get so far as to do that, the thing would have a practical purpose. But your spinning--"
"Now you are talking again against your better convictions," interrupted the other, coolly, "There are more than enough people nowadays who pursue their so-called art for a practical purpose. Just listen once when our colleagues talk about their 'interests.' One would imagine he was at the Bourse: for this picture, five thousand gulden; for that, ten thousand, or even twenty and twenty-five thousand; and that a certain artist has an annual income of so and so much, and owns several houses besides--these things make up the motive power of an incredible number of them. Their pictures have no longer a value, but merely a price. How to go to work and make an equal amount from the fabrication of painted canvas, that is the pivot on which all the labor of an artist's fancy turns, instead of steering straight for the thing itself, as it ought by rights to do. Well, I have nothing in common with this worm that nourishes itself by crawling about in the dust. But what does it matter to me whether I spin silk, or only a plain thread that delights me alone, and from which I can beat my wings and soar away into space?"
"You are a thousand times too good for this century of banks and bourses, my dear enthusiast!" cried Rossel, with a sigh of honest admiration. "But, even though you despise the golden fruit on the tree of life, still all sorts of other things flourish there, which even the best of men need not be ashamed to find beautiful and desireable: for instance, fame or love, upon which you also turn your back with sublime contempt. Your life is quite as earnest as your art, and yet you know what Schiller says. If you go on in this way a few years longer, your flame of life will have consumed all its wick; and the magic-lantern pictures which the light has thrown on the dark background of your existence will go down with you into eternal night."
"No!" cried the other, and his yellow face lit up with a red flush. "I do not feel this fear! _Non omnis moriar!_ Something of me will be left behind; and though you may be right that no glory will come to me during my life, a soft shimmer of posthumous fame will warm my bones under the ground, of that I am certain. For better times are coming, or else may God take pity on this wretched world, and dash it to pieces before it becomes one vast dung-heap from which no living flower will spring. Many a day when I have begun to lose faith, amid the wretchedness of the present, I have repeated to myself those comforting verses of Hölderlin's about the future of mankind."