Man having thus become the rarest and most difficult thing in the world
to know (I am not speaking of his heart, O moralists!), it follows that
the artist ignores his shape as well as the qualities that render it
beautiful. Where is the poet, nowadays, even amongst the most brilliant,
who knows what a woman is like? Where could the poor fellow ever have
seen any? What has he ever been able to learn about them in the salons;
could he see through the corset and the crinoline?
Better than all the rhetoric in the world, the plastic art teaches those
who study it the gradation of proportions, the fusion of planes, in a
word, harmony. The ancient races, through the very fact of their
existence, left the mark of their noble attitudes and pure blood on the
works of the masters. In Juvenal, I can hear confusedly the death-rattles
of the gladiators; Tacitus has sentences that resemble the drapery of a
laticlave, and some of Horace's verses are like the body of a Greek slave,
with supple undulations, and short and long syllables that sound like
crotala.
But why bother about these things? Let us not go so far back, and let us
be satisfied with what is manufactured.
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