Others thought them
tremendously knowing, and paid enormous prices for them; and indeed, to
be able to point to one of Gloriani's figures in a shady corner of your
library was tolerable proof that you were not a fool. Corrupt things
they certainly were; in the line of sculpture they were quite the latest
fruit of time. It was the artist's opinion that there is no essential
difference between beauty and ugliness; that they overlap and
intermingle in a quite inextricable manner; that there is no saying
where one begins and the other ends; that hideousness grimaces at you
suddenly from out of the very bosom of loveliness, and beauty blooms
before your eyes in the lap of vileness; that it is a waste of wit to
nurse metaphysical distinctions, and a sadly meagre entertainment to
caress imaginary lines; that the thing to aim at is the expressive, and
the way to reach it is by ingenuity; that for this purpose everything
may serve, and that a consummate work is a sort of hotch-potch of the
pure and the impure, the graceful and the grotesque. Its prime duty is
to amuse, to puzzle, to fascinate, to savor of a complex imagination.
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