You color the features with
flesh-tones, mixed beforehand on your palette,--taking very good care to
shade one side of the face darker than the other; and because you draw
now and then from a nude woman standing on a table, you think you can
copy nature; you fancy yourselves painters, and imagine that you have
got at the secret of God's creations! Pr-r-r-r!--To be a great poet it
is not enough to know the rules of syntax and write faultless grammar.
Look at your saint, Porbus. At first sight she is admirable; but at
the very next glance we perceive that she is glued to the canvas, and
that we cannot walk round her. She is a silhouette with only one side,
a semblance cut in outline, an image that can't turn nor change her
position. I feel no air between this arm and the background of the
picture; space and depth are wanting. All is in good perspective; the
atmospheric gradations are carefully observed, and yet in spite of
your conscientious labor I cannot believe that this beautiful body has
the warm breath of life. If I put my hand on that firm, round throat I
shall find it cold as marble. No, no, my friend, blood does not run
beneath that ivory skin; the purple tide of life does not swell those
veins, nor stir those fibres which interlace like net-work below the
translucent amber of the brow and breast. This part palpitates with
life, but that other part is not living; life and death jostle each
other in every detail. Here, you have a woman; there, a statue; here
again, a dead body.
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