Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers

42. CHAPTER XLII: ULLATHORNE SPORTS--ACT III (continued)

'Yes, about my profession, if you can call it one.'

'And is it not one?' said Eleanor. 'Were I a man, I know none I should prefer to it, except painting. And I believe the one is as much in your power as the other.'

'Yes, just about equally so,' said Bertie with a little touch of inward satire directed at himself. He knew in his heart that he would never make a penny by either.

'I have often wondered, Mr Stanhope, why you do not exert yourself more,' said Eleanor, who felt a friendly fondness for the man with whom she was walking. 'But I know it is very impertinent in me to say so.'

'Impertinent!' said he. 'Not so, but much too kind. It is much too kind in you to take an interest in so idle a scamp.'

'And make busts of the bishop, dean and chapter? Or perhaps, if I achieve great success, obtain a commission to put up an elaborate tombstone over a prebendary's widow, a dead lady with a Grecian nose, a bandeau, and an intricate lace veil; lying of course on a marble sofa, from among the legs of which Death will be creeping out and poking at his victim with a small toasting-fork.'

Eleanor laughed; but yet she thought that if the surviving prebendary paid the bill the object of the artist as a professional man would, in great measure, be obtained.

'I don't know about the dean and chapter and the prebendary's widow,' said Eleanor. 'Of course you must take them as they come. But the fact of your having a great cathedral in which such ornaments are required, could not but be in your favour.'

'No real artist could descend to the ornamentation of a cathedral,' said Bertie, who had his ideas of the high ecstatic ambition of art, as indeed all artists have, who are not in receipt of a good income. 'Building should be fitted to grace the sculpture, not the sculpture to grace the building.'