He would assert with his last breath--which was rather short, for he suffered from indigestion--that one must never concrete anything in terms of ordinary nature. No! one must devise pictures of life that would be equally unfamiliar to men in A.D. 2520 as they had been in A.D. 1920; and when an inconsiderate person drew his attention to the fact that to the spectator in 2520 the most naturalistic pictures of the life of 1920 would seem quite convincingly fantastic, so that there was no need for him to go out of his way to devise fantasy--he would stare. For he was emphatically not one of those who did not care a button what the form was so long as the spirit of the artist shone clear and potent through the pictures he drew. No, no; he either demanded the poetical, the thing that got off the ground, with the wind in its hair (and he himself would make the wind, rather perfumed); or--if not the poetical--something observed with extreme fidelity and without the smallest touch of that true danger to art, the temperamental point of view. “No!” he would say; “it’s our business to put it down just as it is, to see it, not to feel it. In feeling damnation lies.” And nothing gave him greater uneasiness than to find the emotions of anger, scorn, love, reverence, or pity surging within him as he worked, for he knew that they would, if he did not at once master them, spoil a certain splendid vacuity that he demanded of all art. In painting, Raphael, Tintoretto, and Holbein pleased him greatly; in fiction, “Salammbô” was his model, for, as he very justly said, you could supply to it what soul you liked--there being no inconvenient soul already in possession. As can be well imagined, his conviction of being, in a small way, God, permeated an outlook that was passionless, and impartial to a degree--except perhaps toward the bourgeoisie, with their tiring morals and peculiar habits. If he had a weakness, it was his paramount desire to suppress in himself any symptoms of temperament, except just that temperament of having no temperament, which seemed to him the only one permissible to an artist, who, as he said, was nothing if not simply either a recorder or a weaver of beautiful lines in the air. Record and design, statement and decoration--these, in combination, constituted creation! It was to him a certain source of pleasure that he had discovered this. Not that he was, of course, neglectful of sensations, but he was perfectly careful not to _feel_ them--in order that he might be able to record them, or use them for his weaving in a purely æsthetic manner. The moment they impinged on his spirit, and sent the blood to his head, he reined in, and began tracing lines in the air, a practice that never failed him.