George Eliot: Middlemarch

BOOK II. OLD AND YOUNG. 19. CHAPTER XIX. (continued)

"Confound you, Naumann! I don't know what I shall do. I am not so brazen as you."

"Bah! that is because you are dilettantish and amateurish. If you were an artist, you would think of Mistress Second-Cousin as antique form animated by Christian sentiment--a sort of Christian Antigone-- sensuous force controlled by spiritual passion."

"Yes, and that your painting her was the chief outcome of her existence--the divinity passing into higher completeness and all but exhausted in the act of covering your bit of canvas. I am amateurish if you like: I do NOT think that all the universe is straining towards the obscure significance of your pictures."

"But it is, my dear!--so far as it is straining through me, Adolf Naumann: that stands firm," said the good-natured painter, putting a hand on Ladislaw's shoulder, and not in the least disturbed by the unaccountable touch of ill-humor in his tone. "See now! My existence presupposes the existence of the whole universe-- does it NOT? and my function is to paint--and as a painter I have a conception which is altogether genialisch, of your great-aunt or second grandmother as a subject for a picture; therefore, the universe is straining towards that picture through that particular hook or claw which it puts forth in the shape of me-- not true?"

"But how if another claw in the shape of me is straining to thwart it?-- the case is a little less simple then."

"Not at all: the result of the struggle is the same thing-- picture or no picture--logically."

Will could not resist this imperturbable temper, and the cloud in his face broke into sunshiny laughter.

"Come now, my friend--you will help?" said Naumann, in a hopeful tone.

"No; nonsense, Naumann! English ladies are not at everybody's service as models. And you want to express too much with your painting. You would only have made a better or worse portrait with a background which every connoisseur would give a different reason for or against. And what is a portrait of a woman? Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff after all. They perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising them. Language is a finer medium."