Titian most, and the wildness of nature is valuable to him mainly for its sympathy with this emotion.  He wants to give a single powerful feeling and to give it with the utmost dramatic force—­to give it theatrically even, one might admit of this particular picture; for it is by no means so favorable an example of Titian’s method, or of the older methods of art in general, as is Sargent’s “Hermit” of the modern way of seeing and painting.  To attain this end he simplifies and arranges everything.  He lowers the pitch of his coloring to a sombre glow and concentrates the little light upon his kneeling figure.  He spends all his knowledge on so drawing and modelling that figure as to make you feel to the utmost its bulk and reality and the strain upon its muscles and tendons, and he so places everything else on his canvas as to intensify its action and expression.  The gaze of the saint is fixed upon a crucifix high on the right of the picture, and the book behind him, the lines of the rocks, the masses of the foliage, even the general formation of the ground, are so disposed as to echo and reinforce the great diagonal.  There is a splendid energy of invention in the drawing of the tree stems, but the effect is clear and simple with nothing of Sargent’s dazzle and confusion.  As for the lion, he is a mere necessary mark of identification, and Titian has taken no interest in him.

[Illustration:  Plate 22.—­Titian.  “St. Jerome in the Desert.”  In the Brera Gallery, Milan.]

Now, it is evident that there is not nearly so much literal truth to the appearance of nature in this picture as in Sargent’s.  It is not only that it would never have occurred to Titian to try to paint the glittering spottiness of sunlight splashing through leafage, or to attempt to raise his key of light to something like that of nature, at the cost of fulness of color.  It is not merely that he translates and simplifies and neglects certain truths that the world had not yet learned to see.  He deliberately and intentionally falsifies.  He knew as well as we do that a natural landscape would not arrange itself in such lines and masses for the purpose of throwing out the figure and of enhancing its emotion.  But to him natural facts were but so much material, to be treated as he pleased for the carrying out of his purpose.  He was a colorist and a chiaroscurist; and he had a great deal more interest in light and in landscape than most of the painters of his time.  If he had been pre-eminently a draughtsman, like Michelangelo, he would have reduced his light and shade to the amount strictly necessary to give that powerful modelling of the figure which is the draughtsman’s means of expression, would have greatly increased the relative size and importance of the figure, and would have reduced the landscape to a barely intelligible symbol.  Had he been a linealist, like Botticelli, he would have eliminated modelling almost altogether, would have concentrated his attention upon the edges of things, and would have reduced his picture to a flat pattern in which the beauty and expressiveness of the lines should be almost the only attraction.