Upon a high point of an easel was hung a crown of thorns, and beside this leaned a reed; but Dufour explained that he had abandoned that more conventional incident in favour of the Temptation in the Wilderness, and explained at some length the treatment that he contemplated of the said Temptation. Nothing, of course, was to be as it had ever been before; the searching light of modern thought, of modern realism, was to be let in upon this old illustration, from which time had worn the sharpness long ago.
"They must feel it; it must come right down to them to their lives; they must find it in their path as they walk—irrefutable, terrible—and the experience of any one of them!" Dufour had said. "And for that, contrast! You have here the simplicity of the figure; the man, white, assured, tense, unassailable. Then, here and there, around and above, the thousand soft presentments of temptation. And these, though imaginatively treated, are to be real—real. He was a man; they say He had a man's temptations; but where do we really hear of them? You will see them in my picture; all that has ever come to you or me is to be there. Etherealised, lofty, deified, but . . . our temptations."
"And you see what a subject? The advantages, the opportunities? The melting of the two methods? The plein air for the figure, and all that Art has ever known or imagined outside this world—everything a painter's brain has ever seen in dreams—for the surroundings. Is it to be great? Is it to be final? Ah, you shall see! And yours is the face of all the world for it. You are a re-incarnation. One moment so. I must have the head trols quarts with the chin raised."
Dufour talked himself to perspiration, so Wladislaw said, and even I at third hand was warmed and elated.
