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How I used to swear at that boy for not coming quick enough to fetch my copy! I knew the young scoundrel's step I knew the step of every man and boy in that office. I knew the way each of them went up and down the stairs, and coughed or whistled or spat. What knowledge dies with me now that I am gone! Qualis artifex pereo! But that boy how I should love to be swearing at him now!
But it was quickly evident that in that company there was one man who either was, or wished to be dictator and artifex a man of loud voice and domineering tone, who was laying down the law to the accompaniment of vigorous thumpings of the table at which he sat.
This is too much for the distracted brother, who poignards the Prince. Hamlet expires with Nero's cry on his lips: "Ah! Ah! Qualis ... artifex ... pereo!" And, as the author remarks: "He rendered to immutable nature his Hamletic soul." William enters and, discovering his Kate, gives her a sound beating; not the first or the last, as she apprises us.
In one passage Cicero writes of having seen him looking so wild and gesticulating so excitedly, that he seemed almost to have lost command of himself. In the description, already quoted from the speech pro Sestio, of the scene in the theatre before his recall from exile, he speaks of this "summus artifex" as delivering his allusions to the exile with infinite force and passion.
He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen, but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death, "Qualis artifex pereo!" better than most history.
But the wiser heads, notably the Fra Battista, whose successor I am as Superior of Santa Croce, held that such exceeding beauty of the flesh came of the operation of the Devil, who is an artist in the sense the dying Nero understood the word when he said, "Qualis artifex pereo!"
For surely this is no idle nor fantastic saying. At the touch of a true artist, the plainest face turns comely. As subject-matter the face is no more than suggestive, as ground, merely a loom round which the beatus artifex may spin the threads of any golden fabric: 'Quae nunc nomen habent operosi signa Maronis Pondus iners quondam duraque massa fuit.
But no one cares except mysel' that serve an' understand My seven-thousand horse-power here. Eh, Lord! They're grand they're grand! Uplift am I? When first in store the new-made beasties stood, Were ye cast down that breathed the Word declarin' all things good? Not so! O' that world-liftin' joy no after-fall could vex, Ye've left a glimmer still to cheer the Man the Artifex!
As for yourself, you are too much the "virtuosic genius"; too much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhaps the most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most artificial known to us. You are perhaps the most brilliant artifex of music.
Another with similar tastes and similar power might have ordered everything which pleasured his eye to be carted to Rome, but in his quality of artifex omnipotens Hadrian embellished and never sacked. There were painters and sculptors enough in that army at his heels, and whatever appealed to him was copied on the spot.
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