Two Years Ago Volume I Part 27

"About that accursed slavery question!"

La Cordifiamma looked at him with firm-closed lips a while.

"So then! I was not aware of this! Even so long ago you saw the Sangreal, and did not know it when you saw it. No wonder that since then you have been staring at it for months, in your very hands, played with it, admired it, made verses about it, to show off your own taste: and yet were blind to it the whole time! Farewell, then!"

"Marie, what do you mean?" and Stangrave caught both her hands.

"Hush, if you please. I know you are eloquent enough, when you choose, though you have been somewhat dumb and monosyllabic to-night in the presence of the actress whom you undertook to educate. But I know that you can be eloquent, so spare me any brilliant appeals, which can only go to prove that already settled fact. Between you and me lie two great gulfs. The one I have told you of; and from it I shrink. The other I have not told you of; from it you would shrink."

"The first is your Quest of the Sangreal."

She smiled a.s.sent, bitterly enough.

"And the second?"

She did not answer. She was looking at herself in the mirror; and Stangrave, in spite of his almost doting affection, flushed with anger, almost contempt, at her vanity.

And yet, was it vanity which was expressed in that face? No; but dread, horror, almost disgust, as she gazed with side-long, startled eyes, struggling, and yet struggling in vain, to turn her face from some horrible sight, as if her own image had been the Gorgon's head.

"What is it? Marie, speak!"

But she answered nothing. For that last question she had no heart to answer; no heart to tell him that in her veins were some drops, at least, of the blood of slaves. Instinctively she had looked round at the mirror--for might he not, if he had eyes, discover that secret for himself? Were there not in her features traces of that taint? And as she looked,--was it the mere play of her excited fancy,--or did her eyelid slope more and more, her nostril shorten and curl, her lips enlarge, her mouth itself protrude?

It was more than the play of fancy; for Stangrave saw it as well as she. Her actress's imagination, fixed on the African type with an intensity proportioned to her dread of seeing it in herself, had moulded her features, for the moment, into the very shape which it dreaded. And Stangrave saw it, and shuddered as he saw.

Another half minute, and that face also had melted out of the mirror, at least for Marie's eyes; and in its place an ancient negress, white-haired, withered as the wrinkled ape, but with eyes closed--in death. Marie knew that face well; a face which haunted many a dream of hers; once seen, but never forgotten since; for to that old dame's coffin had her mother, the gay quadroon woman, flaunting in finery which was the price of shame, led Marie when she was but a three years' child; and Marie had seen her bend over the corpse, and call it her dear old granny, and weep bitter tears.

Suddenly she shook off the spell, and looked round and clown, terrified, self-conscious. Her eye caught Stangrave's; she saw, or thought she saw, by the expression of his face, that he knew all, and burst away with a shriek.

He sprang up and caught her in his arms. "Marie! Beloved Marie!" She looked up at him struggling; the dark expression had vanished, and Stangrave's love-blinded eyes could see nothing in that face but the refined and yet rich beauty of the Italian.

"Marie, this is mere madness; you excite yourself till you know not what you say, or what you are--"

"I know what I am," murmured she: but he hurried on unheeding.

"You love me, you know you love me; and you madden yourself by refusing to confess it!" He felt her heart throb as he spoke, and knew that he spoke truth. "What gulfs are these you dream of? No; I will not ask. There is no gulf between me and one whom I adore, who has thrown a spell over me which I cannot resist, which I glory in not resisting; for you have been my guide, my morning star, which has awakened me to new life. If I have a n.o.ble purpose upon earth, if I have roused myself from that conceited dream of self-culture which now looks to me so cold, and barren, and tawdry, into the hope of becoming useful, beneficent--to whom do I owe it but to you, Marie? No; there is no gulf, Marie! You are my wife, and you alone!" And he held her so firmly, and gazed down upon her with such strong manhood, that her woman's heart quailed; and he might, perhaps, have conquered then and there, had not Sabina, summoned by her shriek, entered hastily.

"Good heavens! what is the matter?"

"Wait but one minute, Mrs. Mellot," said he; "the next, I shall introduce you to my bride."

"Never! never! never!" cried she, and breaking from him, flew into Sabina's arms. "Leave me, leave me to bear my curse alone!"

And she broke out into such wild weeping, and refused so wildly to hear another word from Stangrave, that he went away in despair, the prize s.n.a.t.c.hed from his grasp in the very moment of seeming victory.

He went in search of Claude, who had agreed to meet him at the Exhibition in Trafalgar Square. Thither Stangrave rolled away in his cab, his heart full of many thoughts. Marie's words about him, though harsh and exaggerated, were on the whole true. She had fascinated him utterly. To marry her was now the one object of his life: she had awakened in him, as he had confessed, n.o.ble desires to be useful: but the discovery that he was to be useful to the negro, that abolition was the Sangreal in the quest of which he was to go forth, was as disagreeable a discovery as he could well have made.

From public life in any shape, with all its vulgar noise, its petty chicanery, its pandering to the mob whom he despised, he had always shrunk, as so many Americans of his stamp have done. He had no wish to struggle, unrewarded and disappointed, in the ranks of the minority; while to gain place and power on the side of the majority was to lend himself to that fatal policy which, ever since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, has been gradually making the northern states more and more the tools of the southern ones. He had no wish to be threatened in Congress with having his Northerner's "ears nailed to the counter, like his own base coin," or to be informed that he, with the 17,000,000 of the north, were the "White Slaves" of a southern aristocracy of 350,000 slaveholders. He had enough comprehension of, enough admiration for the n.o.ble principles of the American Const.i.tution to see that the democratic mobs of Irish and Germans, who were stupidly playing into the hands of the Southerners, were not exactly carrying them out; but he had no mind to face either Irish or Southerners. The former were too vulgar for his delicacy; the latter too aristocratic for his pride. Sprung, as he held (and rightly), from as fine old English blood as any Virginian (though it did happen to be Puritan, and not Cavalier), he had no l.u.s.t to come into contact with men who considered him much further below them in rank than an English footman is below an English n.o.bleman; who, indeed, would some of them look down on the English n.o.bleman himself as a mushroom of yesterday.

So he compounded with his conscience by ignoring the whole matter, and by looking on the state of public affairs on his side of the Atlantic with a cynicism which very soon (as is usual with rich men) pa.s.sed into Epicureanism. Poetry and music, pictures and statues, amus.e.m.e.nt and travel, became his idols, and cultivation his subst.i.tute for the plain duty of patriotism, and wandering luxuriously over the world, he learnt to sentimentalise over cathedrals and monasteries, pictures and statues, saints and kaisers, with a lazy regret that such "forms of beauty and n.o.bleness" were no longer possible in a world of scrip and railroads: but without any notion that it was his duty to reproduce in his own life, or that of his country, as much as he could of the said beauty and n.o.bleness. And now he was sorely tried. It was interesting enough to "develop" the peculiar turn of Marie's genius, by writing for her plays about liberty, just as he would have written plays about jealousy, or anything else for representing which she had "capabilities." But to be called on to act in that Slavery question, the one in which he knew (as all sensible Americans do) that the life and death of his country depended, and which for that very reason he had carefully ignored till a more convenient season, finding in its very difficulty and danger an excuse for leaving it to solve itself:--to have this thrust on him, and by her, as the price of the thing which he must have, or die! If she had asked for his right hand, he would have given it sooner; and he entered the Royal Academy that day in much the same humour as that of a fine lady who should find herself suddenly dragged from the ball-room into the dust-hole, in her tenderest array of gauze and jewels, and there peremptorily compelled to sift the cinders, under the superintendence of the sweep and the pot-boy.

Glad to escape from questions which he had rather not answer too soon, he went in search of Claude, and found him before one of those pre-Raphaelite pictures, which Claude does not appreciate as he ought.

"Desinit in Culicem mulier formosa superne," said Stangrave, as he looked over Claude's shoulder; "but I suppose he followed nature, and copied his model."

"That he didn't," said Claude, "for I know who his model was: but if he did he had no business to do so. I object on principle to these men's notion of what copying nature means. I don't deny him talent.

I am ready to confess that there is more imagination and more honest work in that picture than in any one in the room. The hysterical, all but grinning joy upon the mother's face is a miracle of truth; I have seen the expression more than once; doctors see it often, in the sudden revulsion from terror and agony to certainty and peace; I only marvel where he ever met it: but the general effect is unpleasing, marred by patches of sheer ugliness, like that child's foot. There is the same mistake in all his pictures. Whatever they are, they are not beautiful; and no magnificence of surface-colouring will make up, in my eyes, for wilful ugliness of form. I say that nature is beautiful; and therefore nature cannot have been truly copied, or the general effect would have been beautiful also. I never found out the fallacy till the other day, when looking at a portrait by one of them. The woman for whom it was meant was standing by my side, young and lovely; the portrait hung there neither young nor lovely, but a wrinkled caricature twenty years older than the model."

"I surely know the portrait you mean; Lady D----'s."

"Yes. He had simply, under pretence of following nature, caricatured her into a woman twenty years older than she is."

"But did you ever see a modern portrait which more perfectly expressed character; which more completely fulfilled the requirements which you laid down a few evenings since?"

"Never; and that makes me all the more cross with the wilful mistake of it. He had painted every wrinkle."

"Why not, if they were there?"

"Because he had painted a face not one-twentieth of the size of life.

What right had he to cram into that small s.p.a.ce all the marks which nature had spread over a far larger one?"

"Why not, again, if he diminished the marks in proportion?"

"Just what neither he nor any man could do, without making them so small as to be invisible, save under a microscope: and the result was, that he had caricatured every wrinkle, as his friend has in those horrible knuckles of Shem's wife. Besides, I deny utterly your a.s.sertion that one is bound to paint what is there. On that very fallacy are they all making s.h.i.+pwreck."

"Not paint what is there? And you are the man who talks of art being highest when it copies nature."

"Exactly. And therefore you must paint, not what is there, but what you see there. They forget that human beings are men with two eyes, and not daguerreotype lenses with one eye, and so are contriving and striving to introduce into their pictures the very defect of the daguerreotype which the stereoscope is required to correct."

"I comprehend. They forget that the double vision of our two eyes gives a softness, and indistinctness, and roundness, to every outline."

"Exactly so; and therefore, while for distant landscapes, motionless, and already softened by atmosphere, the daguerreotype is invaluable (I shall do nothing else this summer but work at it), yet for taking portraits, in any true sense, it will be always useless, not only for the reason I just gave, but for another one which the pre-Raphaelites have forgotten."

"Because all the features cannot be in focus at once?"

"Oh no, I am not speaking of that. Art, for aught I know, may overcome that; for it is a mere defect in the instrument. What I mean is this: it tries to represent as still what never yet was still for the thousandth part of a second: that is, the human face; and as seen by a spectator who is perfectly still, which no man ever yet was. My dear fellow, don't you see that what some painters call idealising a portrait is, if it be wisely done, really painting for you the face which you see, and know, and love; her ever-s.h.i.+fting features, with expression varying more rapidly than the gleam of the diamond on her finger; features which you, in your turn, are looking at with ever-s.h.i.+fting eyes; while, perhaps, if it is a face which you love and have lingered over, a dozen other expressions equally belonging to it are hanging in your memory, and blending themselves with the actual picture on your retina:--till every little angle is somewhat rounded, every little wrinkle somewhat softened, every little shade somewhat blended with the surrounding light, so that the sum total of what you see, and are intended by Heaven to see, is something far softer, lovelier--younger, perhaps, thank Heaven--than it would look if your head was screwed down in a vice, to look with one eye at her head screwed down in a vice also:--though even that, thanks to the muscles of the eye, would not produce the required ugliness; and the only possible method of fulfilling the pre-Raphaelite ideal would be, to set a petrified Cyclops to paint his petrified brother."

"You are spiteful."

"Not at all. I am standing up for art, and for nature too. For instance: Sabina has wrinkles. She says, too, that she has grey hairs coming. The former I won't see, and therefore don't. The latter I can't see, because I am not looking for them."

"Nor I either," said Stangrave smiling. "I a.s.sure you the announcement is new to me."

"Of course. Who can see wrinkles in the light of those eyes, that smile, that complexion?"

"Certainly," said Stangrave, "if I asked for her portrait, as I shall do some day, and the artist sat down and painted the said 'wastes of time,' on pretence of their being there, I should consider it an impertinence on his part. What business has he to spy out what nature has taken such charming trouble to conceal?"

"Again," said Claude, "such a face as Cordifiamma's. When it is at rest, in deep thought, there are lines in it which utterly puzzle one--touches which are Eastern, Kabyle, almost Quadroon."