And yet they are all of equal merit. Nay, more. The Stanze, the Transfiguration, the panels, and the three easel pictures in the Vatican are in the highest degree perfect and sublime. But they demand a stress of attention, even from the most accomplished beholder, and serious study, to be fully understood; while the Violin-player, the Marriage of the Virgin, and the Vision of Ezekiel go straight to the heart through the portal of sight, and make their home there. It is a pleasure to receive them thus without an effort; if it is not the highest phase of art, it is the happiest. This fact proves that, in the begetting of works of art, there is as much chance in the character of the offspring as there is in a family of children; that some will be happily graced, born beautiful, and costing their mothers little suffering, creatures on whom everything smiles, and with whom everything succeeds; in short, genius, like love, has its fairer blossoms.
This brio, an Italian word which the French have begun to use, is characteristic of youthful work. It is the fruit of an impetus and fire of early talent—an impetus which is met with again later in some happy hours; but this particular brio no longer comes from the artist's heart; instead of his flinging it into his work as a volcano flings up its fires, it comes to him from outside, inspired by circumstances, by love, or rivalry, often by hatred, and more often still by the imperious need of glory to be lived up to.
This group by Wenceslas was to his later works what the Marriage of the Virgin is to the great mass of Raphael's, the first step of a gifted artist taken with the inimitable grace, the eagerness, and delightful overflowingness of a child, whose strength is concealed under the pink-and-white flesh full of dimples which seem to echo to a mother's laughter. Prince Eugene is said to have paid four hundred thousand francs for this picture, which would be worth a million to any nation that owned no picture by Raphael, but no one would give that sum for the finest of the frescoes, though their value is far greater as works of art.
Hortense restrained her admiration, for she reflected on the amount of her girlish savings; she assumed an air of indifference, and said to the dealer:
"What is the price of that?"
"Fifteen hundred francs," replied the man, sending a glance of intelligence to a young man seated on a stool in the corner.
The young man himself gazed in a stupefaction at Monsieur Hulot's living masterpiece. Hortense, forewarned, at once identified him as the artist, from the color that flushed a face pale with endurance; she saw the spark lighted up in his gray eyes by her question; she looked on the thin, drawn features, like those of a monk consumed by asceticism; she loved the red, well-formed mouth, the delicate chin, and the Pole's silky chestnut hair.
"If it were twelve hundred," said she, "I would beg you to send it to me."
"It is antique, mademoiselle," the dealer remarked, thinking, like all his fraternity, that, having uttered this ne plus ultra of bric-a-brac, there was no more to be said.
"Excuse me, monsieur," she replied very quietly, "it was made this year; I came expressly to beg you, if my price is accepted, to send the artist to see us, as it might be possible to procure him some important commissions."
"And if he is to have the twelve hundred francs, what am I to get? I am the dealer," said the man, with candid good-humor.
"To be sure!" replied the girl, with a slight curl of disdain.
"Oh! mademoiselle, take it; I will make terms with the dealer," cried the Livonian, beside himself.
Fascinated by Hortense's wonderful beauty and the love of art she displayed, he added:
"I am the sculptor of the group, and for ten days I have come here three times a day to see if anybody would recognize its merit and bargain for it. You are my first admirer—take it!"
"Come, then, monsieur, with the dealer, an hour hence.—Here is my father's card," replied Hortense.
Then, seeing the shopkeeper go into a back room to wrap the group in a piece of linen rag, she added in a low voice, to the great astonishment of the artist, who thought he must be dreaming:
"For the benefit of your future prospects, Monsieur Wenceslas, do not mention the name of the purchaser to Mademoiselle Fischer, for she is our cousin."
The word cousin dazzled the artist's mind; he had a glimpse of Paradise whence this daughter of Eve had come to him. He had dreamed of the beautiful girl of whom Lisbeth had told him, as Hortense had dreamed of her cousin's lover; and, as she had entered the shop—
"Ah!" thought he, "if she could but be like this!"
The look that passed between the lovers may be imagined; it was a flame, for virtuous lovers have no hypocrisies.
"Well, what the deuce are you doing here?" her father asked her.
"I have been spending twelve hundred francs that I had saved. Come." And she took her father's arm.
"Twelve hundred francs?" he repeated.
"To be exact, thirteen hundred; you will lend me the odd hundred?"
"And on what, in such a place, could you spend so much?"
"Ah! that is the question!" replied the happy girl. "If I have got a husband, he is not dear at the money."
"A husband! In that shop, my child?"
"Listen, dear little father; would you forbid my marrying a great artist?"
"No, my dear. A great artist in these days is a prince without a title—he has glory and fortune, the two chief social advantages—next to virtue," he added, in a smug tone.
"Oh, of course!" said Hortense. "And what do you think of sculpture?"
"It is very poor business," replied Hulot, shaking his head. "It needs high patronage as well as great talent, for Government is the only purchaser. It is an art with no demand nowadays, where there are no princely houses, no great fortunes, no entailed mansions, no hereditary estates. Only small pictures and small figures can find a place; the arts are endangered by this need of small things."
"But if a great artist could find a demand?" said Hortense.
"That indeed would solve the problem."
"Or had some one to back him?"
"That would be even better."
"If he were of noble birth?"
"Pooh!"
"A Count."
"And a sculptor?"
"He has no money."
"And so he counts on that of Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot?" said the Baron ironically, with an inquisitorial look into his daughter's eyes.
"This great artist, a Count and a sculptor, has just seen your daughter for the first time in his life, and for the space of five minutes, Monsieur le Baron," Hortense calmly replied. "Yesterday, you must know, dear little father, while you were at the Chamber, mamma had a fainting fit. This, which she ascribed to a nervous attack, was the result of some worry that had to do with the failure of my marriage, for she told me that to get rid of me—"
"She is too fond of you to have used an expression——"
"So unparliamentary!" Hortense put in with a laugh. "No, she did not use those words; but I know that a girl old enough to marry and who does not find a husband is a heavy cross for respectable parents to bear.—Well, she thinks that if a man of energy and talent could