Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/42

Rh would put a quantity of gold into the pot, and then, turning to his guns, cause "all sorts of unexpected mischief in the trenches." Again we say "Perhaps," and again, in the next moment, we grant that whether Cellini served as artilleryman and goldsmith in the same moment or not,—a pretty tall order,—he draws a picture of the scene that for vividness and dramatic interest is unimpeachable. Curiously, too, his picture apparently causes him no trouble in the painting. This maker of literature was never a literary man, never for even the smallest fraction of a second. It was probably with no very definite consciousness of just what he was doing that he gave his recollections their extraordinarily tangible form. You could not say of him that he understood the art of omission, for that implies a professional faculty, the instinct of the man of letters; yet one of the great sources of Cellini's charm is this gift for painting an episode without a superfluous touch. The commentator selecting an illustration is tempted, as a matter of course, to take one showing Cellini in a crisis of some sort, to choose the "important" passage; but I think we do him better justice if we take him in more familiar mood, if we take him when he is treating of some ordinary affair in his daily life. There is the tale of his meeting with Madonna Porzia at the Farnesina, and of her giving him a jewel to set. Flaubert himself, slaving his hardest, could not have approached the lucidity and the vitality of those three or four