Our Lady of Darkness by Bernard Capes — Read

Facing an opulent sunset, Ned made his way some three or four miles out of Liége through scenery whose very luxuriance affected him like the qualmish aftermath of excess. It gave him a feeling of surfeit -- of committal to a debauch of colour that it was no part of his temperament to indulge. If his soul had attached itself to any theory of beauty, it was to a theory of orderliness and sobriety, that took account of barbaric dyes but to set them to an accordant pattern. Its genius was of an adaptive rather than an imaginative bent. It desired to shape his world to man, not man to his world -- to appropriate the accidents of nature to the uses of a wholesomely picturesque race -- to emasculate the bull of violence by withdrawing from its very experience the hues of crimson and orange.

On any display of passion this young man looked with cool dislike. His instincts were primarily for the gratification of the understanding. The premeditated involutions of fancy did not engage his sympathies. The mystery of brooding distances peopled with irisated phantoms, of the hazy wanderings of the undefined, he was not greatly concerned to penetrate. Claude he would have preferred to Turner, and Nasmyth to either. Fuseli he already detested; and Blake was his very _bête noire_. Things rude, boisterous, and ugly he would wish to crush under a heel of iron, thinking to enforce the peace -- rather after the fashion of his times -- by breaking it. But he would raise, not level, the world to an equality -- would make out of its material a very handsome model, in which the steeples should clang and the water-wheels turn and the seasons pulsate by a mechanism common to all.