Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/168

 quarter size. She was in a black dress without the slightest relief, which rendered her much exaggerated paleness still more striking, and the whole thing floated away in a blue mist so that one would think it was a young tobacco-smoking woman who had just enveloped herself in smoke; only that this did not seem to stream out of her compressed bloodless lips but rather from her indistinct, expressionless eyes an art which, as everybody knows, is not yet discovered. This kind of misty picture had in those days just come into vogue. And this was a man who had painted his beloved! Where was the love that goes into all details, the jealous care that preserves even the smallest of them, because it sees that which is greatest behind, the self-forgetting losing of oneself in the object, the love's realism in which there is only room for a loving idealism, which far from hiding the individuality only wants to put it in the clearest and truest light? Nothing of all this; everything here was sketchy, and the whole thing done in a careless sort of way in order to blur it in the indistinct fashion of the moment, affecting an artistic "vue" rather than giving a human aspect. The more I looked at this portrait the stronger became my disgust and fury against this man, who had painted Minna in such a way, this artist, who so boldly had prepared a picture after the last recipe, who had taken his beloved as a "subject" and had dodged all the difficulties, and indeed everything that should have been made clear. It seemed to me that, if he came into the room, I should take him by the collar, drag him in front of this sinful work, shake him soundly and shout into his ear, "What a beastly modern and artistically decayed ass you really are! Look there, you knight of the palette, what a disgusting scarecrow of a lie in colours you have made, with the most beautiful of God's creation