He stood a good half hour before the lion-hunt, looking at it as though
for the first time. And then, as though tearing himself away with
difficulty, he took Felix by the arm and said, "You know I am no mere
fanatical _doctrinaire_. Nobody can have more respect for the other
great artists of the golden age. But still it always seems to me as
though I did not find, even in the greatest and most immortal of them,
a true balance between art and Nature. There is always an excess of
technical aim over unaffected seeing and feeling--an excess of 'can'
over 'must.' Even with Raphael (whom, it is true, they say one doesn't
really know until one has seen his work in Rome), I feel a too great
excess of the purely spiritual and abstract over the sensuous. And with
the glorious Titian and the Venetians, this paradisaic naturalness,
this effortless flow of beauty from an exhaustless soil, this breathing
forth of pure and unadulterated force and freedom, is only found in
their greatest moments; while this man, like the immortal gods, seems
never to have known an hour of poverty or insufficiency."

He talked on in this fashion for some time, as though to pour out his
heart before his friend. But just as they were standing before the
little picture of Rubens and his beautiful young wife in the garden,
walking beside a bed of tulips, they heard Angelica's voice behind
them.

"I cannot help it, gentlemen; you must tear yourselves away from this
well-fed domestic happiness and these tedious box-hedges, and come with
me. I have something to show you that is quite as much a masterpiece of
its kind. Please have confidence in my artistic eye for this once, and
come quickly, before the miracle disappears again."

"What is this beautiful thing you have discovered, Fraeulein?" asked
Felix, laughing, "that instantly vanishes again if one is not
immediately on the watch?"

"Something that is alive--but hardly according to your taste, as I
imagine it," answered the painter. "But our master there--"

"A beautiful woman?"

"Ah! and what a woman! I have followed her about like a young Don Juan
ever since we have been here, and looked askance at her as I stood
before the pictures. She seems to be a little near-sighted--at least
she half shuts her eyelids when she looks intently at anything; and she
looks at the upper row of pictures through a lorgnette. A blonde--and a
face, I tell you--and a figure!--just what you call _Portament_,
Jansen--t