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- 3265
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- 3228
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- unreasonable a dissent from the opinion of nearly all the other
connections and relatives of the deceased. But the portrait which she
held to do justice to her husband, correctly to convey his features in
detail, and more especially their truest, and finest, and noblest
combined expression; this portrait was a much larger one, and in the
great drawing-room below occupied the most conspicuous and honorable
place on the wall.
Even to Pierre these two paintings had always seemed strangely
dissimilar. And as the larger one had been painted many years after the
other, and therefore brought the original pretty nearly within his own
childish recollections; therefore, he himself could not but deem it by
far the more truthful and life-like presentation of his father. So that
the mere preference of his mother, however strong, was not at all
surprising to him, but rather coincided with his own conceit. Yet not
for this, must the other portrait be so decidedly rejected. Because, in
the first place, there was a difference in time, and some difference of
costume to be considered, and the wide difference of the styles of the
respective artiste, and the wide difference of those respective,
semi-reflected, ideal faces, which, even in the presence of the
original, a spiritual artist will rather choose to draw from than from
the fleshy face, however brilliant and fine. Moreover, while the larger
portrait was that of a middle-aged, married man, and seemed to possess
all the nameless and slightly portly tranquillities, incident to that
condition when a felicitous one; the smaller portrait painted a brisk,
unentangled, young bachelor, gayly ranging up and down in the world;
light-hearted, and a very little bladish perhaps; and charged to the
lips with the first uncloying morning fullness and freshness of life.
Here, certainly, large allowance was to be made in any careful, candid
estimation of these portraits. To Pierre this conclusion had become
well-nigh irresistible, when he placed side by side two portraits of
himself; one taken in his early childhood, a frocked and belted boy of
four years old; and the other, a grown youth of sixteen. Except an
indestructible, all-surviving something in the eyes and on the temples,
Pierre could hardly recognize the loud-laughing boy in the tall, and
pensively smiling youth. If a few years, then, can have in me made all
this difference, why not in my father? thought Pierre.
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