How shall you contemplate with
indifference the career of an artist whom genius or good guidance
has compelled to exercise his peculiar skill, to indulge his finer
aptitudes? A masterly theft rises in its claim to respect high above the
reprobation of the moralist. The scoundrel, when once justice is quit
of him, has a right to be appraised by his actions, not by their
effect; and he dies secure in the knowledge that he is commonly more
distinguished, if he be less loved, than his virtuous contemporaries.
While murder is wellnigh as old as life, property and the pocket
invented theft, late-born among the arts. It was not until avarice
had devised many a cunning trick for the protection of wealth, until
civilisation had multiplied the forms of portable property, that
thieving became a liberal and an elegant profession. True, in pastoral
society, the lawless man was eager to lift cattle, to break down the
barrier between robbery and warfare. But the contrast is as sharp
between the savagery of the ancient reiver and the polished performance
of Captain Hind as between the daub of the pavement and the perfection
of Velasquez.
So long as the Gothic spirit governed Europe, expressing itself in
useless ornament and wanton brutality, the more delicate crafts had
no hope of exercise. Even the adventurer upon the road threatened his
victim with a bludgeon, nor was it until the breath of the Renaissance
had vivified the world that a gentleman and an artist could face the
traveller with a courteous demand for his purse.
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