ch0a

ch0a: "The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait"
ch0b: "In spite, however, of continued shocks, which drove him from breathless flights"
ch0c: "In their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed"
ch0d: "One night in early spring, standing at the foot of the staircase in the library"
ch0e: "Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artistic economy"
ch0f: "His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified"
ch0g: "In calmer mood the critic in him could not but remark a strange prelude"



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The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron, memorial aspect.



Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only.



Our world, again, recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches and is, for the most part, estranged from those of its members who seek through some art, by some process of the mind as yet untabulated, to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts.

'Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.; Michelangelo


But for such as these a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion.



Use of reason is by popular judgment antedated by some seven years and so it is not easy to set down the exact age at which the natural sensibility of the subject of this portrait awoke to the ideas of eternal damnation, the necessity of penitence and the efficacy of prayer.



His training had early developed a very lively sense of spiritual obligations at the expense of what is called 'common sense.' He ran through his measure like a spendthrift saint, astonishing many by ejaculatory fervours, offending many by airs of the cloister.



One day in a wood near Malahide a labourer had marvelled to see a boy of fifteen praying in an ecstasy of Oriental posture.



It was indeed a long time before this boy understood the nature of the most marketable goodness which makes it possible to give comfortable assent to propositions without ordering one's life in accordance with them.



The digestive value of religion he never appreciated and he chose, as more fitting his case those poorer humbler orders in which a confessor did not seem anxious to reveal himself, in theory at least, a man of the world.

(see below for examples)


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