of creative virility in the
full heyday of its omnipotence.

And Pierre was yet more overcome when he began to examine these
presentments of humanity, magnified as by the eyes of a visionary,
overflowing in mighty sympathetic pages of cyclopean symbolisation. Royal
grace and nobility, sovereign peacefulness and power--every beauty shone
out like natural florescence. And there was perfect science, the most
audacious foreshortening risked with the certainty of success--an
everlasting triumph of technique over the difficulty which an arched
surface presented. And, in particular, there was wonderful simplicity of
medium; matter was reduced almost to nothingness; a few colours were used
broadly without any studied search for effect or brilliancy. Yet that
sufficed, the blood seethed freely, the muscles projected, the figures
became animated and stood out of their frames with such energy and dash
that it seemed as if a flame were flashing by aloft, endowing all those
beings with superhuman and immortal life. Life, aye, it was life, which
burst forth and triumphed--mighty, swarming life, miraculous life, the
creation of one sole hand possessed of the supreme gift--simplicity
blended with power.

That a philosophical system, a record of the whole of human destiny,
should have been found therein, with the creation of the world, of man,
and of woman, the fall, the chastisement, then the redemption, and
finally God's judgment on the last day--this was a matter on which Pierre
was unable to dwell, at this first visit, in the wondering stupor into
which the paintings threw him. But he could not help noticing how the
human body, its beauty, its power, and its grace were exalted! Ah! that
regal Jehovah, at once terrible and paternal, carried off amid the
whirlwind of his creation, his arms outstretched and giving birth to
worlds! And that superb and nobly outlined Adam, with extended hand, whom
Jehovah, though he touch him not, animates with his finger--a wondrous
and admirable gesture, leaving a sacred space between the finger of the
Creator and that of the created--a tiny space, in which, nevertheless,
abides all the infinite of the invisible and the mysterious. And then
that powerful yet adorable Eve, that Eve with the sturdy flanks fit for
the bearing of humanity, that Eve with the proud, tender grace of a woman
bent on being loved even to perdition, that Eve embodying the whole of
woman with her fecundity, her seductiveness, her