The rich
imagination of the youth fastened upon the one perceptible and clear
clew to the mystery of this supernatural being,--the presence of the
artistic nature, that wild impassioned nature to which such mighty
powers have been confided, which too often abuses those powers, and
drags cold reason and common souls, and even lovers of art, over stony
and arid places, where for such there is neither pleasure nor
instruction; while to the artistic soul itself,--that white-winged
angel of sportive fancy,--epics, works of art, and visions rise along
the way. It is a nature, an essence, mocking yet kind, fruitful though
destitute. Thus, for the enthusiastic Poussin, the old man became by
sudden transfiguration Art itself,--art with all its secrets, its
transports, and its dreams.
"Yes, my dear Porbus," said Frenhofer, speaking half in reverie, "I
have never yet beheld a perfect woman; a body whose outlines were
faultless and whose flesh-tints--Ah! where lives she?" he cried,
interrupting his own words; "where lives the lost Venus of the
ancients, so long sought for, whose scattered beauty we snatch by
glimpses? Oh! to see for a moment, a single moment, the divine
completed nature,--the ideal,--I would give my all of fortune. Yes; I
would search thee out, celestial Beauty! in thy farthest sphere. Like
Orpheus, I would go down to hell to win back the life of art--"
"Let us go," said Porbus to Poussin; "he neither sees nor hears us any
longer."
"Let us go to his atelier," said the wonder-struck young man.
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