A Soldier of the Great War

by Mark Helprin

I’ve also written four articles on this painting.” He rattled off the titles of the articles and the names of the journals in which they had appeared. “I don’t remember the dates, but if you’re doing a paper on Giorgione you’re bound to run into them.” The scholar had already run across the articles and had remembered them. “But if you do,” Alessandro continued, “ignore them. They’re all wrong. I know, intelligent criticism cannot be ‘wrong,’ but I was wrong to submit to the tyranny by which critics of art live, and to follow the road that they follow, because, to maintain their society and vocation, they parse by intellect alone works that are great solely because of the spirit. “You’re visited with penalties if you transgress,” he went on, speaking in a kind of storm, “but I’m no longer afraid of censure by my colleagues or of being without the Academy, for I walked out myself and can never return. “Do you know why?” he asked, stepping closer to the stranger. “The Academy is a mouse house, and to live within it you must be a house mouse. I didn’t want to be a house mouse in a mouse house.”