dignified in sensuousness he always remained even when, as at this
middle stage of his career, the vivifying shafts of poetry no longer
pierced through, and transmuted with their vibration of true passion,
the fair realities of life. He could never have been guilty of the
frigid and calculated indecency of a Giulio Romano; he could not have
cast aside all conventional restraints, of taste as well as of
propriety, as Rubens and even Rembrandt did on occasion; but as Van
Dyck, the child of Titian almost as much as he was the child of Rubens,
ever shrank from doing. Still the ease and splendour of the life at Biri
Grande--that pleasant abode with its fair gardens overlooking Murano,
the Lagoons, and the Friulan Alps, to which Titian migrated in 1531--the
Epicureanism which saturated the atmosphere, the necessity for keeping
constantly in view the material side of life, all these things operated
to colour the creations which mark this period of Titian's practice, at
which he has reached the apex of pictorial achievement, but shows
himself too serene in sensuousness, too unruffled in the masterly
practice of his profession to give to the heart the absolute
satisfaction that he affords to the eyes. This is the greatest test of
genius of the first order--to preserve undimmed in mature manhood and
old age the gift of imaginative interpretation which youth and love
give, or lend, to so many who, buoyed up by momentary inspiration, are
yet not to remain permanently in the first rank. With Titian at this
time supreme ability is not invariably illumined from within by the lamp
of genius; the light flashes forth nevertheless, now and again, and most
often in those portraits of men of which the sublime _Charles V. at
Mühlberg_ is the greatest. Towards the end the flame will rise once more
and steadily burn, with something on occasion of the old heat, but with
a hue paler and more mysterious, such as may naturally be the outward
symbol of genius on the confines of eternity.