d man, hastily
interrupting Porbus with a despotic gesture. "If it were not so, a
sculptor could reach the height of his art by merely moulding a
woman. Try to mould the hand of your mistress, and see what you will
get,--ghastly articulations, without the slightest resemblance to her
living hand; you must have recourse to the chisel of a man who, without
servilely copying that hand, can give it movement and life. It is our
mission to seize the mind, soul, countenance of things and beings.
Effects! effects! what are they? the mere accidents of the life, and not
the life itself. A hand,--since I have taken that as an example,--a
hand is not merely a part of the body, it is far more; it expresses and
carries on a thought which we must seize and render. Neither the painter
nor the poet nor the sculptor should separate the effect from the cause,
for they are indissolubly one. The true struggle of art lies there. Many
a painter has triumphed through instinct without knowing this theory of
art as a theory.

"Yes," continued the old man vehemently, "you draw a woman, but you do
not _see_ her. That is not the way to force an entrance into the arcana
of Nature. Your hand reproduces, without an action of your mind, the
model you copied under a master. You do not search out the secrets
of form, nor follow its windings and evolutions with enough love and
perseverance. Beauty is solemn and severe, and cannot be attained in
that way; we must wait and watch its times and seasons, and clasp it
firmly ere it yields to us. Form is a Proteus less easily captured, more
skilful to double and escape, than the Proteus of fable; it is only
at the cost of struggle that we compel it to come forth in its true
aspects. You young men are content with the first glimpse you get of it;
or, at any rate, with the second or the third. This is not the spirit
of the great warriors of art,--invincible powers, not misled by
will-o'-the-wisps, but advancing always until they force Nature to lie
bare in her divine integrity. That was Raphael's method," said the old
man, lifting his velvet cap in homage to the sovereign of art; "his
superiority came from the inward essence which seems to break from the
inner to the outer of his figures. Form with him was what it is with
us,--a medium by which to communicate ideas, sensations, feelings; in
short, the infinite poesy of being. Every figure is a world; a portrait,
whose original stands forth like a sublime vision, c