Free A Rich Full Death by Michael Dibdin

landscapes in the world; and not mind Fra Somebody’s frescoes, but choose instead to study — what luxury!—that lizard there upon the sun-hot wall, so absolutely still and weighty you’d swear him incapable of movement, a toy worked in gold and bronze by Cellini, except if you blink he’s gone! All this, Prescott, and much more, upon the miserable pittance my father sends, thinking it not quite enough to live on (as would be true in Boston) so that I’ll be obliged sooner or later to turn my hand to some earnest trade—and in the meantime he’s done his duty by his feckless idle offspring.
    But after a while these marvels pall, as marvels will—is this not why literary visions of hell are so much more convincing than those of paradise? And what’s your exile life then but a heap of motley moments pasted at random into a commonplace book: some good, some bad, all meaningless, devoid of any sense of purpose, neither redeemed nor threatened by the informing touch of the Real.
    And then one day I had my insight! I had been reading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists —reading it here in the city where Vasari was born, and which he never ceased to regard—like the majority of his fellow-citizens—as the centre and cynosure of the world; reading it amid the surviving works of those giants of whom he writes with the same easy yet undiminishing familiarity as Homer of his heroes. And as I came to know this second-rate dauber, who walked with the Great and was transfigured, something stirred in the back of my own brain. Like Vasari, I was not Great—that bitter lesson had been learned. But had Greatness therefore been abolished? Because I had fallen short, did the goal cease to exist? And were there not others, more worthy than I, who would grasp that torch handed down through the ages? All that I had to do, then, was to find one of these men who have that Power, to stand close to him, and draw off a portion of that Greatness from him, as Buonarroti’s Adam draws Life itself from his Creator’s finger.
    But first I had to find the man! No easy task, and one of which I have often despaired. He had, first, to be truly Great—for, having duped myself for dreary years, I have no wish now to become another’s dupe. First, then, the threshing, to tell wheat from chaff—nor could I make the task easier by following the crowd to one of the idols of the age such as Mr Powers, for I had no wish to worship from afar, one of a throng. My Great Man would be mine alone! My glory would lie in my having recognised his before it became a mere commonplace, parroted in every review.
    And now at last I think my efforts are all rewarded, Prescott, and I almost dare to say that I have found my man! I shall speak no more of this for the moment—though I expect to talk of nothing else for the remainder of my life—for first I must conclude my account of this bad business by describing the dramatic developments which ensued the following morning. But can you now understand my interest in every detail of Browning’s life, in every one of his words and deeds, however obscure or apparently trivial? For what particle of Greatness is not itself Great, and which of its meanest features is unworthy of our attention?

 
    When I awoke the next morning the weather had changed completely. The sky weighed down like a cauldron lid upon the city, which on such a day can appear the most dreary, inhospitable, depressing place on earth. All its picturesque charms wither and shrivel away to nothing, illusions foisted on us by our desire to escape the realities of our own bleak age. Seen with such a cold eye, what are all these palaces and towers and walls and gates but the grim relics of a history that was anything but gay, if the truth be known. It is on such days that the exile asks himself for the hundredth time just what on earth he is doing here, ekeing out a tenuous unreal existence in the shadow of these massive monuments to Power and Wealth and