Constantine Logotheti had at least two reasons for not going out to
Versailles as soon as Mrs. Rushmore signified her desire to know him.
In the first place he was 'somebody,' and an important part of being
'somebody' is to keep the fact well before the eyes of other people. He
was altogether too great a personage to be at the beck and call of
every one who wanted to know him. Secondly, he did not wish Margaret to
think that he was running after her, for the very good reason that he
meant to do so with the least possible delay.
Lushington, who was really both sensitive and imaginative, used to tell
Margaret that he was a realist. Logotheti, who was by nature, talent
and education a thorough materialist, loved to believe that he
possessed both a rich imagination and the gift of true sentiment.
Margaret had delighted him at first sight, though he was hard to
please, and though she was not a great beauty. She appealed directly to
that love of life for its own sake which was always the strength, the
genius and the snare of the Greek people, and which is not extinct in
their modern descendants. Logotheti certainly had plenty of it, and his
first impression, when he had met Margaret Donne, was that he had met
his natural mate. There was nothing in the very least psychological
about the sensation, and yet it was not the result of a purely physical
attraction. It brought with it a satisfaction of artistic taste that
was an unmarred pleasure in itself.
True art has gone much further in deifying humanity than in humanising
divinity. The Hermes of Olympia is a man made into a god; no Christian
artist has ever done a tenth as well in presenting the image of God
made Man. When imagination soars towards an invisible world it loses
love of life as it flies higher, till it ends in glorifying death as
the only means of reaching heaven; and in doing that it has often
descended to a gross realism that would have revolted the Greeks--to
the materialism of anatomical preparations that make one think of the
dissecting-room, if one has ever been there.
Love of genuine art is the best sort of love of life, and the really
great artists have always been tremendously vital creatures. So-called
artistic people who are sickly or merely under-vitalised generally go
astray after strange gods; or, at the best, they admire works of art
for the sake of certain pleasing, or sad, or even unhealthy
associations which these call up.
Logotheti came of a race which, through being temporarily isolated from
modern progress, has not grown old with it. For it seems pretty sure
that progress means, with many other things, the survival of the unfit
and the transmission of unfitness to a generation of old babies; but
where men are not disinfected, sterilised, fed on preserved carrion and
treated with hypodermics from the cradle to the grave, the good old law
of nature holds its own and the weak ones die young, while the strong
fight for life and are very much alive while they live.