Cosmopolis — Volume 2 by Paul Bourget
page 77 of 116 (66%)
page 77 of 116 (66%)
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effort toward forming a new city by the side of the old one. One could
see an angle of the old garden and the fragment of an antique building, with a church steeple beyond. It was on a background of azure, of verdure and of ruins, in a horizon larger and more distant, but composed of the same elements, that was to arise the face of the young girl, designed after the manner, so sharp and so modelled, of the 'Pier della Francesca', with whom Maitland had been preoccupied for six months. All great composers, of an originality more composite than genitive, have these infatuations. Maitland was at his easel, dressed with that correct elegance which is the almost certain mark of Anglo-Saxon artists. With his little varnished shoes, his fine black socks, spotted with red, his coat of quilted silk, his light cravat and the purity of his linen, he had the air of a gentleman who applied himself to an amateur effort, and not of the patient and laborious worker he really was. But his canvases and his studies, hung on all sides, among tapestries, arms and trinkets, bespoke patient labor. It was the history of an energy bent upon the, acquisition of a personality constantly fleeting. Maitland manifested in a supreme degree the trait common to almost all his compatriots, even those who came in early youth to Europe, that intense desire not to lack civilization, which is explained by the fact that the American is a being entirely new, endowed with an activity incomparable, and deprived of traditional saturation. He is not born cultivated, matured, already fashioned virtually, if one may say so, like a child of the Old World. He can create himself at his will. With superior gifts, but gifts entirely physical, Maitland was a self-made man of art, as his grand father had been a self-made man of money, as his father had been a self- made man of war. He had in his eye and in his hand two marvellous |
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