the liberty of drawing from his
own inner consciousness what he needed in order to bestow upon the ideal
images he longed to create the grandeur, strength, and sublimity in
which he beheld them rise before his purified soul!
Yet, with all this, he must remain faithful to truth, copy from Nature
what he desired to represent. Every finger, every lock of hair, must
correspond with reality to the minutest detail, and yet the whole must
be pervaded and penetrated, as the blood flows through the body, by the
thought that filled his mind and soul.
A reflected image of the ideal and of his own mood, faithful to truth,
free, and yet obedient to the demands of moderation--in this sentence
Hermon summed up the result of his solitary meditations upon art and
works of art. Since he had found the gods again, he perceived that the
Muse had confided to him a sacerdotal office. He intended to perform its
duties, and not only attract and please the beholder's eyes through his
works, but elevate his heart and mind, as beauty, truth, grandeur, and
eternity uplifted his own soul. He recognised in the tireless creative
power which keeps Nature ever new, fresh, and bewitching, the presence
of the same deity whose rule manifested itself in the life of his own
soul.
So long as he denied its existence, he had recognised no being more
powerful than himself; now that he again felt insignificant beside it,
he knew himself to be stronger than ever before, that the greatest
of all powers had become his ally. Now it was difficult for him to
understand how he could have turned away from the deity. As an artist
he, too, was a creator, and, while he believed those who considered
the universe had come into existence of itself, instead of having been
created, he had robbed himself of the most sublime model. Besides, the
greatest charm of his noble profession was lost to him. Now he knew it,
and was striving toward the goal attainable by the artist alone among
mortals--to hold intercourse with the deity, and by creations full of
its essence elevate the world to its grandeur and beauty.
One day, at the end of the second month of his stay in the desert,
when the Amalekite woman removed the bandage, her boy, whose form he
distinguished as if through a veil, suddenly exclaimed: "The white cover
on your eyes is melting! They are beginning to sparkle a little, and
soon they will be perfectly well, and you can carve the lion's head on
my cane."
Perhaps
|