For each called himself an artist, and was one; and each
knew that so far as the law was concerned the proudest noble in Venice
could marry his daughter without the least derogation from patrician
dignity. The workmen differed from her own father not in station, but
only in the degree of their prosperity.
If Zorzi could ever have been one of them the rest would have been
simple enough. But he could not, any more than a black man could turn
white at will. There was no evasion of law by which a man not born a
Venetian could ever be a glass-blower, or could ever acquire the
privileges possessed from birth by one of those shabby, pale young men
who were crowding past the porter to go to their hard day's work. Yet
dexterous as they were, there was not one that had his skill, there was
not one that could compare with him as an artist, as a workman, as a
man. No Indian caste, no ancient nobility, no mystic priesthood ever set
up a barrier so impassable between itself and the outer world as that
which defended the glass-blowers of Murano for centuries against all who
wished to be initiated. Even the boys who fed the fires all night were
of the calling, and by and by would become workmen, and perhaps masters,
legally almost the equals of the splendid nobles who sat in the Grand
Council over there in Venice.
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