ty
of human things that no eyes in the world could be more impenetrable. And
finally there were Botticelli's hands, so carefully and delicately
painted, so full of life, wantoning so to say in a free atmosphere, now
joining, caressing, and even, as it were, speaking, the whole evincing
such intense solicitude for gracefulness that at times there seems to be
undue mannerism, though every hand has its particular expression, each
varying expression of the enjoyment or pain which the sense of touch can
bring. And yet there was nothing effeminate or false about the painter's
work: on all sides a sort of virile pride was apparent, an atmosphere of
superb passionate motion, absolute concern for truth, direct study from
life, conscientiousness, veritable realism, corrected and elevated by a
genial strangeness of feeling and character that imparted a
never-to-be-forgotten charm even to ugliness itself.

Pierre's stupefaction, however, increased as he listened to Narcisse,
whose somewhat studied elegance, whose curly hair cut in the Florentine
fashion, and whose blue, mauvish eyes paling with enthusiasm he now for
the first time remarked. "Botticelli," he at last said, "was no doubt a
marvellous artist, only it seems to me that here, at any rate, Michael
Angelo--"

But Narcisse interrupted him almost with violence. "No! no! Don't talk of
him! He spoilt everything, ruined everything! A man who harnessed himself
to his work like an ox, who laboured at his task like a navvy, at the
rate of so many square yards a day! And a man, too, with no sense of the
mysterious and the unknown, who saw everything so huge as to disgust one
with beauty, painting girls like the trunks of oak-trees, women like
giant butchers, with heaps and heaps of stupid flesh, and never a gleam
of a divine or infernal soul! He was a mason--a colossal mason, if you
like--but he was nothing more."

Weary "modern" that Narcisse was, spoilt by the pursuit of the original
and the rare, he thus unconsciously gave rein to his fated hate of health
and power. That Michael Angelo who brought forth without an effort, who
had left behind him the most prodigious of all artistic creations, was
the enemy. And his crime precisely was that he had created life, produced
life in such excess that all the petty creations of others, even the most
delightful among them, vanished in presence of the overflowing torrent of
human beings flung there all alive in the sunlight.

"Well, for