Jonas Lie was now a
sufficiently conspicuous man to come into consideration in the
distribution of the official _panem et circenses_. The state awarded
him a largess of $400 for one year (twice renewed), in order to enable
him to go to Italy and "educate himself for a poet;" and he was also
made a beneficiary of the well-known Schafer legacy for the training of
artists. In the autumn of 1871 he started with his wife and four
children for Rome. It was in a solemnly festal frame of mind that he now
resolved to devote the rest of his life to his real vocation, which at
last he had found. This was what they had all meant--his gropings,
trials, and failures. They had all fitted him for the life-work which
was now to be his. The world lay before him as in the shining calm after
storm.
He took his artistic training, as everything else, with extreme
seriousness. With the utmost conscientiousness he started out with his
Thomasine, morning after morning, to study the Vatican and the
Capitoline collections. "Happy is the man," says Goethe, "who learns
early in life what art means.
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