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Updated: May 7, 2025
Even in the grouping and narration of its old incidents it exhibits no dramatic power, and little skill of characterization in the portraiture of its personages.
On the other hand, the beauty and expression of the face and attitude, the mingled loveliness, dignity, and purity, are given with exquisite feeling; and we are never, as in his other representations of the Madonna, reminded of commonplace homely, often peasant, portraiture; here all is spotless grace, ethereal delicacy, benignity, refinement, repose, the very apotheosis of womanhood.
But in the region of feeling his genius is sufficient to his purpose; either when that purpose is a highly creative one, as in the character and achievements of his Dutch heroes, or merely that of portraiture, as in the "Columbus" and the "Washington."
They were the events of the moment, and the personages taking part in them were given in recognisable portraiture. Yet he was able to accomplish it in a way which gratified the overfed vanity of Louis and which more than gratifies the art lover of to-day. The set called the History of Alexander is one of Lebrun's famous works.
But at the moment of change the national life ended in Greece; and portraiture, there, meant insult to her religion, and flattery to her tyrants. And her skill perished, not because she became true in sight, but because she became vile at heart. And now let us think of our own work, and ask how that may become, in its own poor measure, active in some verity of representation.
Both Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon are examples of what fine portraiture Hawthorne could accomplish in exceptional or abnormal personalities, without ever descending to caricature. Moreover, his habit of smiling is an individual trait which gives him a certain distinction of his own. Usually, Faces ever blandly smiling Are victims of their own beguiling.
Montigny, although somewhat influenced by the King's hypocritical assurances of the benignity with which he regarded the Netherlands, was, nevertheless, not to be deceived by this flattering portraiture of a man whom he knew so well and detested so cordially as he did Granvelle.
They illustrate the tendency of the novel at present to rely for its attraction upon scenes and incidents of ordinary life, and the minute portraiture of manners and of character. Dickens owes his popularity largely to the unique sort of drollery and the genuine pathos that are mingled in his pages.
On Voltaire's "Mahomet" he heaped censure, for its unworthy portraiture of the conqueror of the East and its ineffective fatalism. "These pieces belong to an obscure age. Besides, what do they mean with their fatalism? Politics is fatalism." The significance of this saying was soon to be emphasized, so that misapprehension was impossible.
In subtlety of portraiture he is the equal of Edith Wharton, and he excels her in ease and in his ability to subdue his substance to the environment in which it is set. He surpasses Mrs. Gerould by reason of the variety of his subject matter, and as a stylist he is equal to Anne Douglas Sedgwick.
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