--ghastly articulations, without the slightest resemblance to her
living hand; you must have recourse to the chisel of a man who, without
servilely copying that hand, can give it movement and life. It is our
mission to seize the mind, soul, countenance of things and beings.
Effects! effects! what are they? the mere accidents of the life, and
not the life itself. A hand,--since I have taken that as an example,
--a hand is not merely a part of the body, it is far more; it expresses
and carries on a thought which we must seize and render. Neither the
painter nor the poet nor the sculptor should separate the effect from
the cause, for they are indissolubly one. The true struggle of art
lies there. Many a painter has triumphed through instinct without
knowing this theory of art as a theory.

"Yes," continued the old man vehemently, "you draw a woman, but you do
not _see_ her. That is not the way to force an entrance into the arcana
of Nature. Your hand reproduces, without an action of your mind, the
model you copied under a master. You do not search out the secrets of
form, nor follow its windings and evolutions with enough love and
perseverance. Beauty is solemn and severe, and cannot be attained in
that way; we must wait and watch its times and seasons, and clasp it
firmly ere it yields to us. Form is a Proteus less easily captured,
more skilful to double and escape, than the Proteus of fable; it is
only at the cost of struggle that we compel it to come forth in its
true aspects. You young men are content with the first glimpse you get
of it; or, at any rate, with the second or the third. This is not the
spirit of the great warriors of art,--invincible powers, not misled by
will-o'-the-wisps, but advancing always until they force Nature to lie
bare in her divine integrity. That was Raphael's method," said the old
man, lifting his velvet cap in homage to the sovereign of art; "his
superiority came from the inward essence which seems to break from the