His temperament indicated to him, from his earliest awakening to artistic impulse, the course of his education, just as it did, later, the choice of his material. As a youth in Italy he copied Pompeian mural paintings with fervour, and later revelled at the sight of the Quattrocentists. Here he recognised at first sight kindred souls; here, as it were, his blood spoke. He tries, by imitating them piously, to keep them for reminiscences later on. His mystic bent to the old, the obsolete, the risen as from a grave, is a trait connecting him with the Præ-Raphaelites, who were almost his contemporaries. With them he has in common, too, the uncommonly exact and accurate technique. He is a cold but unerring draughtsman. All his accessory work, his architecture, ornaments, implements, and clothing, are marvels of archæological learning or, when this fails, of invention and patiently, painfully achieved execution. His conscientiousness went so far that he painted perhaps twenty or more far advanced sketches of each detail of his large compositions ere he proceeded to the main work, and this, nevertheless, he often left unfinished, because he felt he had not done enough to satisfy his conscience. Those empty, or merely vaguely filled-in spots instead of faces in big pictures, in which all besides—the patterns of the garment stuffs and carpets, the decorations on the splendid vases, the finery, weapons, capitals of the pillars—are precisely rendered as complete productions, give suddenly to the sympathetic an idea of the pains of this struggling spirit. Moreau shunned life, which was too stormy, noisy, and bustling for his morbid need of repose and quiet, but it did not cease to attract him as a mysterious riddle. He would gladly have understood it, comprehended it, and held it fast, but he had to admit to himself that he was powerless to reach it. A homunculus artificially generated in the retort, he can live only in his glass vessel, and must die if he ventures out of it; but through his prison walls he gazes at the great, broad, free nature, replete with tempestuous life, and in the cold of his glassy den he shudders with longing for this world, so near and yet beyond his reach. His longing is, however, never to be appeased; he will never feel the joys of the warm breath of life. IX EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE