de Palancy; in a portrait by Tintoretto, the
invasion of the plumpness of the cheek by an outcrop of whisker, the
broken nose, the penetrating stare, the swollen eyelids of Dr. du Boulbon.
Perhaps because he had always regretted, in his heart, that he had
confined his attention to the social side of life, had talked, always,
rather than acted, he felt that he might find a sort of indulgence
bestowed upon him by those great artists, in his perception of the fact
that they also had regarded with pleasure and had admitted into the canon
of their works such types of physiognomy as give those works the strongest
possible certificate of reality and trueness to life; a modern, almost a
topical savour; perhaps, also, he had so far succumbed to the prevailing
frivolity of the world of fashion that he felt the necessity of finding in
an old masterpiece some such obvious and refreshing allusion to a person
about whom jokes could be made and repeated and enjoyed to-day. Perhaps,
on the other hand, he had retained enough of the artistic temperament to
be able to find a genuine satisfaction in watching these individual
features take on a more general significance when he saw them, uprooted
and disembodied, in the abstract idea of similarity between an historic
portrait and a modern original, whom it was not intended to represent.
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