I need not take you through the catalogue of the master’s mad vagaries and sickening atrocities. Once out in the air and the sunlight again, you gradually forget them; but his noble and heroic works, his idyllic and beautiful works, once seen will never fade from your memory. You have only to look upon his ‘Patroclus’ and his ‘Triumph of Christ,’ and you know that you have been in the presence of ‘one of the great ones of the earth'—an artistic giant, a mighty genius, born in an age which has no room for genius that is above the regulation standard.
Wiertz died as he had lived—a disappointed man. His body and mind both gave way at last. He had sworn to rival Rubens, and he came very near the master once; but the fatal taint in his blood overpowered him, and he descended to the ghastly horrors of the charnel-house and the guillotine, and to arranging cannibal mothers and buried-alive bodies as peep-shows. He was raving when he died. In his last delirium he shrieked for his brushes and his palette. ‘Quick! quick!’ he cried; ‘bring them to me. Oh, the picture I shall paint! Oh, I will surpass Raphael!’ And, shrieking out what mighty things he meant to do, he fell back motionless, and passed into the great silence.
The fame he longed for during his life has come, even after his death, but slowly. But it will increase, and it will last. And this is the best way for fame to come to any man who works not for his own little day, but for the long ages the world has yet to know.
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
GEORGE R. SIMS’S BOOKS.
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