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- ascended the stairs.
In the anteroom, a catalogue was put into his hand. He paused to give
one hurried, comprehensive glance at it. Among long columns of such
names as Rubens, Raphael, Angelo, Domenichino, Da Vinci, all shamelessly
prefaced with the words "undoubted," or "testified," Pierre met the
following brief line:--"_No. 99. A stranger's head, by an unknown
hand._"
It seemed plain that the whole must be a collection of those wretched
imported daubs, which with the incredible effrontery peculiar to some of
the foreign picture-dealers in America, were christened by the loftiest
names known to Art. But as the most mutilated torsoes of the perfections
of antiquity are not unworthy the student's attention, neither are the
most bungling modern incompletenesses: for both are torsoes; one of
perished perfections in the past; the other, by anticipation, of yet
unfulfilled perfections in the future. Still, as Pierre walked along by
the thickly hung walls, and seemed to detect the infatuated vanity which
must have prompted many of these utterly unknown artists in the
attempted execution by feeble hand of vigorous themes; he could not
repress the most melancholy foreboding concerning himself. All the walls
of the world seemed thickly hung with the empty and impotent scope of
pictures, grandly outlined, but miserably filled. The smaller and
humbler pictures, representing little familiar things, were by far the
best executed; but these, though touching him not unpleasingly, in one
restricted sense, awoke no dormant majesties in his soul, and therefore,
upon the whole, were contemptibly inadequate and unsatisfactory.
At last Pierre and Isabel came to that painting of which Pierre was
capriciously in search--No. 99.
"My God! see! see!" cried Isabel, under strong excitement, "only my
mirror has ever shown me that look before! See! see!"
By some mere hocus-pocus of chance, or subtly designing knavery, a real
Italian gem of art had found its way into this most hybrid collection of
impostures.
No one who has passed through the great galleries of Europe,
unbewildered by their wonderful multitudinousness of surpassing
excellence--a redundancy which neutralizes all discrimination or
individualizing capacity in most ordinary minds--no calm, penetrative
person can have victoriously run that painted gauntlet of the gods,
without certain very special emotions, called forth by some one or more
individual paintings, to which, however, both the catalogues and the
criticisms of the greatest connoisseurs deny any all-transcending merit,
at all answering to the effect thus casually produced. There is no time
now to show fully how this is; suffice it, that in such instances, it is
not the abstract excellence always, but often the accidental
congeniality, which occasions this wonderful emotion. Still, the
individual himself is apt to impute it to a different cause; hence, the
headlong enthusiastic admiration of some one or two men for things not
at all praised by--or at most, which are indifferent to--the rest of the
world;--a matter so often considered inexplicable.
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