“That he didn’t,” said Claude, “for I know who his model was:  but if he did he had no business to do so.  I object on principle to these men’s notion of what copying nature means.  I don’t deny him talent.  I am ready to confess that there is more imagination and more honest work in that picture than in any one in the room.  The hysterical, all but grinning joy upon the mother’s face is a miracle of truth; I have seen the expression more than once; doctors see it often, in the sudden revulsion from terror and agony to certainty and peace; I only marvel where he ever met it:  but the general effect is unpleasing, marred by patches of sheer ugliness, like that child’s foot.  There is the same mistake in all his pictures.  Whatever they are, they are not beautiful; and no magnificence of surface-colouring will make up, in my eyes, for wilful ugliness of form.  I say that nature is beautiful; and therefore nature cannot have been truly copied, or the general effect would have been beautiful also.  I never found out the fallacy till the other day, when looking at a portrait by one of them.  The woman for whom it was meant was standing by my side, young and lovely; the portrait hung there neither young nor lovely, but a wrinkled caricature twenty years older than the model.”

“I surely know the portrait you mean; Lady D——­’s.”

“Yes.  He had simply, under pretence of following nature, caricatured her into a woman twenty years older than she is.”

“But did you ever see a modern portrait which more perfectly expressed character; which more completely fulfilled the requirements which you laid down a few evenings since?”

“Never; and that makes me all the more cross with the wilful mistake of it.  He had painted every wrinkle.”

“Why not, if they were there?”

“Because he had painted a face not one-twentieth of the size of life.  What right had he to cram into that small space all the marks which nature had spread over a far larger one?”

“Why not, again, if he diminished the marks in proportion?”

“Just what neither he nor any man could do, without making them so small as to be invisible, save under a microscope:  and the result was, that he had caricatured every wrinkle, as his friend has in those horrible knuckles of Shem’s wife.  Besides, I deny utterly your assertion that one is bound to paint what is there.  On that very fallacy are they all making shipwreck.”

“Not paint what is there?  And you are the man who talks of art being highest when it copies nature.”

“Exactly.  And therefore you must paint, not what is there, but what you see there.  They forget that human beings are men with two eyes, and not daguerreotype lenses with one eye, and so are contriving and striving to introduce into their pictures the very defect of the daguerreotype which the stereoscope is required to correct.”

“I comprehend.  They forget that the double vision of our two eyes gives a softness, and indistinctness, and roundness, to every outline.”