What! Why! How! we felt like asking all at once, but Albertus Magnus only smiled, and we choked our emotion. Why had he never exhibited at the Academy or at a special show? Our friend saw our embarrassment, and shielded us by blurting out: "No! he never exhibited, this obstinate Albertus. He never will. He makes more money than he needs, and will leave it to some cat asylum, for he is a hardened bachelor. Women do not interest him. You won't find one female head in all this amazing collection. Nor has the dear old Diogenes suffered from a love-affair. His only love is his paint. His one weakness is a selfish, a miserly desire to keep all this beautiful paint for himself. Balzac would have delighted to analyse such a peculiar mania. Degas is amiability itself compared with this curmudgeon of genius. Now, don't stop me, Albertus--" "But I must," expostulated the painter. "I am always glad to receive visitors here if they are not dealers or persons ignorant of art, or those who think the moderns can paint. Yet no one comes to see me. My chattering friend here occasionally asks them, and he is a hoaxer. While I go nowhere--I haven't been east of Ninth Avenue for years. What shall I do?" "Paint!" was the curt answer of our friend, as we took our leave. In New York, now, a painter of genius who is known to few! Extraordinary! Is his name really Albertus Magnus, or is that only Latin for Albert Ryder? Our friend shrugged his shoulders and smiled mysteriously. We hate tomfoolery. "Be frank!" we adjured him. He hummed: "In Vishnu land what avatar?" "More Browning!" we sneered.
Then we crossed over to the club and talked art far into the night. Also wet our clay. And Albertus Magnus, will he never come from his paint cave and reveal to the world his masterpieces? Perhaps. Who knows? As the Russians say--_Avos!_
Here lies one whose name is writ on ivory! might be the epigraph of every great pianist's life, and the ivory is about as perdurable stuff as the water in which is written the epitaph of John Keats. Despite cunning reproductive contrivances the executive musician has no more chance of lasting fame than the actor. The career of both is brief, but brilliant. Glory, then, is largely a question of memory, and when the contemporaries of a tonal artist pass away then he has no existence except in the biographical dictionaries. Creative, not interpretative, art endures. Better be "immortal" while you are alive, which wish may account for the number of young men who write their memoirs while their cheeks are still virginal of beards, while the pianist or violinist plays his autobiography, and this may be some compensation for the eternal injustice manifested in matters mundane.