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These later edifices are built, as you see, in one generally accordant style, though with such subordinate variety as keeps the beholder's curiosity excited, and causes each structure, like its owner's character, to produce its own peculiar impression.
At the same time they somehow bring a lump of pity and piety into the throat at the thought of the things he did and suffered. They bring him from history and make him at home in the beholder's heart, and there seems a mystical significance in the fact that the volume most abounding in marginalia should be Seneca's Prophecies.
It was a wonderful dance a dance of sensuous contortion crossed and arrested at every moment by the fierce flash of pride, the swift gesture of contempt indicative of the land that had conceived it a dance that would diminish to the merest sway of the body accompanied by the slow, hypnotic enticement of half-closed eyes, and then, as a fan might shut or open, leap back in an instant to a barbaric frenzy of motion in which loosened hair and flaming draperies carried the beholder's senses upon a tide of intoxication.
M. Renoir's second manner is more directly related to the Impressionist methods: it is that of his landscapes, his flowers and his portraits. Here one can feel his relationship with Manet and with Claude Monet. These pictures are hatchings of colours accumulated to render less the objects than their transparency across the atmosphere. The portraits are frankly presented and broadly executed. The artist occupies himself in the first place with getting correct values and an exact suggestion of depth. He understands the illogicality of a false perfection which is as interested in a trinket as in an eye, and he knows how to proportion the interest of the picture which should guide the beholder's look to the essential point, though every part should be correctly executed. He knows how to interpret nature in a certain sense; how to stop in time; how to suggest by leaving a part apparently unfinished; how to indicate, behind a figure, the sea or some landscape with just a few broad touches which suffice to suggest it without usurping the principal part. It is now, that Renoir paints his greatest works, the Déjeûner des Canotiers, the Bal au Moulin de la Galette, the Box, the Terrace, the First Step, the Sleeping Woman with a Cat, and his most beautiful landscapes; but his nature is too capricious to be satisfied with a single technique. There are some landscapes that are reminiscent of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the Woman with the broken neck is related to Manet; the portrait of Sisley invents pointillism fifteen years before the pointillists; La Pensée, this masterpiece, evokes Hoppner. But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct: the Jeune Fille au panier is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the delightful Jeune Fille
How, with the tintless pallor of her skin and the classic straightness of her lineaments, she managed to look sensual, I don't know. I think her lips and eyes contrived the affair between them, and the result left no uncertainty on the beholder's mind. She was sensual now, and in ten years' time she would be coarse promise plain was written in her face of much future folly.
From its rear projected the Stars and Stripes and a busy stovepipe, the latter reinforcing in its suggestion of culinary comforts the general suggestion of privacy and ease. The beholder's eye, regarding its gorgeous sides, found interest to culminate in a single name in gold and blue letters extending almost its entire length a single name, the audacious privilege of royalty and genius.
The frameworks of the dwelling-houses began to rise from the earth, presenting, in their unfinished condition, a bristling, uncomfortable appearance, suggesting thoughts in the beholder's mind highly disparaging to art, and deeply sympathetic with outraged nature. The tents still stood, and the campfire burned, but the superior proportions of the rising fort threw these entirely into the shade.
They are the jewels of the upper earth, which also shines with gold and silver and the like, and they are set in the light of day and are large and abundant and in all places, making the earth a sight to gladden the beholder's eye.
The monuments, if I may keep coming back to them, are plain things, often, with no attempt upon the beholder's emotions.
"Do you know her well?" An odd smile dimpled her face. "Sometimes I think I do, and then again I wonder." "I have been told she is beautiful." "Beauty is in the beholder's eyes, señor. Valencia Valdés is as Heaven made her." "I have no doubt; but Heaven took more pains with some of us than others it appears."
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