I was strangely impressed. It was as though I were suddenly
transported into a world in which the values were changed.
I stood by, at a loss, like a stranger in a land where the
reactions of man to familiar things are all different from
those he has known. Stroeve tried to talk to me about the
picture, but he was incoherent, and I had to guess at what he meant.
Strickland had burst the bonds that hitherto had held him.
He had found, not himself, as the phrase goes, but a new
soul with unsuspected powers. It was not only the bold
simplification of the drawing which showed so rich and so
singular a personality; it was not only the painting, though
the flesh was painted with a passionate sensuality which had
in it something miraculous; it was not only the solidity, so
that you felt extraordinarily the weight of the body; there
was also a spirituality, troubling and new, which led the
imagination along unsuspected ways, and suggested dim empty
spaces, lit only by the eternal stars, where the soul, all
naked, adventured fearful to the discovery of new mysteries.
If I am rhetorical it is because Stroeve was rhetorical.
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