Then, as if in pursuance of a definite plan, he analysed with a
searching, vehement intensity the curious talent of the modern Frenchman,
Gustave Moreau. Margaret had lately visited the Luxembourg, and his
pictures were fresh in her memory. She had found in them little save a
decorative arrangement marred by faulty drawing; but Oliver Haddo gave
them at once a new, esoteric import. Those effects as of a Florentine
jewel, the clustered colours, emerald and ruby, the deep blue of
sapphires, the atmosphere of scented chambers, the mystic persons who
seem ever about secret, religious rites, combined in his cunning phrases
to create, as it were, a pattern on her soul of morbid and mysterious
intricacy. Those pictures were filled with a strange sense of sin, and
the mind that contemplated them was burdened with the decadence of Rome
and with the passionate vice of the Renaissance; and it was tortured,
too, by all the introspection of this later day.
Margaret listened, rather breathlessly, with the excitement of an
explorer before whom is spread the plain of an undiscovered continent.
Pages:
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175