He who has never stood pensive by a friend's
side in such an hour of poetic dreaming can hardly understand its
inexpressible soothingness. Favored by the clear-obscure, the
material skill employed by art to produce illusion entirely
disappears. If the work is a picture, the figures represented
seem to speak and walk; the shade is shadow, the light is day;
the flesh lives, eyes move, blood flows in their veins, and
stuffs have a changing sheen. Imagination helps the realism of
every detail, and only sees the beauties of the work. At that
hour illusion reigns despotically; perhaps it wakes at nightfall!
Is not illusion a sort of night to the mind, which we people with
dreams? Illusion then unfolds its wings, it bears the soul aloft
to the world of fancies, a world full of voluptuous imaginings,
where the artist forgets the real world, yesterday and the
morrow, the future--everything down to its miseries, the good and
the evil alike.
At this magic hour a young painter, a man of talent, who saw in
art nothing but Art itself, was perched on a step-ladder which
helped him to work at a large high painting, now nearly finished.
Criticising himself, honestly admiring himself, floating on the
current of his thoughts, he then lost himself in one of those
meditative moods which ravish and elevate the soul, soothe it,
and comfort it. His reverie had no doubt lasted a long time.
Night fell. Whether he meant to come down from his perch, or
whether he made some ill-judged movement, believing himself to be
on the floor--the event did not allow of his remembering exactly
the cause of his accident--he fell, his head struck a footstool,
he lost consciousness and lay motionless during a space of time
of which he knew not the length.
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