Part 15 (1/2)
The rich sombre light of the rooms, the rich heavy warmth of the stove-heated air, the brilliant and varied colouring and gilded frames which embroidered the walls, the hushed earnestness of a few artists, who were copying, and the few visitors who were lounging from picture to picture, struck me at once with mysterious awe. But my attention was in a moment concentrated on one figure opposite to me at the furthest end. I hurried straight towards it. When I had got half-way up the gallery I looked round for my cousin. He had turned aside to some picture of a Venus which caught my eye also, but which, I remember now, only raised in me then a shudder and a blush, and a fancy that the clergymen must be really as bad as my mother had taught me to believe, if they could allow in their galleries pictures of undressed women. I have learnt to view such things differently now, thank G.o.d. I have learnt that to the pure all things are pure. I have learnt the meaning of that great saying--the foundation of all art, as well as all modesty, all love, which tells us how ”the man and his wife were both naked, and not ashamed.” But this book is the history of my mental growth; and my mistakes as well as my discoveries are steps in that development, and may bear a lesson in them.
How I have rambled! But as that day was the turning-point of my whole short life, I may be excused for lingering upon every feature of it.
Timidly, but eagerly, I went up to the picture, and stood entranced before it. It was Guido's St. Sebastian. All the world knows the picture, and all the world knows, too, the defects of the master, though in this instance he seems to have risen above himself, by a sudden inspiration, into that true naturalness, which is the highest expression of the Spiritual. But the very defects of the picture, its exaggeration, its theatricality, were especially calculated to catch the eye of a boy awaking out of the narrow dulness of Puritanism. The breadth and vastness of light and shade upon those manly limbs, so grand and yet so delicate, standing out against the background of lurid night, the helplessness of the bound arms, the arrow quivering in the shrinking side, the upturned brow, the eyes in whose dark depths enthusiastic faith seemed conquering agony and shame, the parted lips, which seemed to ask, like those martyrs in the Revelations, reproachful, half-resigned, ”O Lord, how long?”--Gazing at that picture since, I have understood how the idolatry of painted saints could arise in the minds even of the most educated, who were not disciplined by that stern regard for fact which is--or ought to be--the strength of Englishmen. I have understood the heart of that Italian girl, whom some such picture of St. Sebastian, perhaps this very one, excited, as the Venus of Praxiteles the Grecian boy, to hopeless love, madness, and death. Then I had never heard of St. Sebastian. I did not dream of any connexion between that, or indeed any picture, and Christianity; and yet, as I stood before it, I seemed to be face to face with the ghosts of my old Puritan forefathers, to see the spirit which supported them on pillories and scaffolds--the spirit of that true St. Margaret, the Scottish maiden whom Claverhouse and his soldiers chained to a post on the sea-sands to die by inches in the rising tide, till the sound of her hymns was slowly drowned in the dash of the hungry leaping waves. My heart swelled within me, my eyes seemed bursting from my head with the intensity of my gaze, and great tears, I knew not why, rolled slowly down my face.
A woman's voice close to me, gentle yet of deeper tone than most, woke me from my trance.
”You seem to be deeply interested in that picture?”
I looked round, yet not at the speaker. My eyes before they could meet hers, were caught by an apparition the most beautiful I had ever yet beheld. And what--what--have I seen equal to her since? Strange, that I should love to talk of her. Strange, that I fret at myself now because I cannot set down on paper line by line, and hue by hue, that wonderful loveliness of which--. But no matter. Had I but such an imagination as Petrarch, or rather, perhaps, had I his deliberate cold self-consciousness, what volumes of similes and conceits I might pour out, connecting that peerless face and figure with all lovely things which heaven and earth contain. As it is, because I cannot say all, I will say nothing, but repeat to the end again and again, Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beyond all statue, picture, or poet's dream. Seventeen--slight but rounded, a masque and features delicate and regular, as if fresh from the chisel of Praxiteles--I must try to describe after all, you see--a skin of alabaster (privet-flowers, Horace and Ariosto would have said, more true to Nature), stained with the faintest flush; auburn hair, with that peculiar crisped wave seen in the old Italian pictures, and the warm, dark hazel eyes which so often accompany it; lips like a thread of vermillion, somewhat too thin, perhaps--but I thought little of that then; with such perfect finish and grace in every line and hue of her features and her dress, down to the little fingers and nails, which showed through her thin gloves, that she seemed to my fancy fresh from the innermost chamber of some enchanted palace, ”where no air of heaven could visit her cheek too roughly.” I dropped my eyes quite dazzled. The question was repeated by a lady who stood with her, whose face I remarked then--as I did to the last, alas!--too little; dazzled at the first by outward beauty, perhaps because so utterly unaccustomed to it.
”It is indeed a wonderful picture,” I said, timidly. ”May I ask what is the subject of it?”
”Oh! don't you know?” said the young beauty, with a smile that thrilled through me. ”It is St. Sebastian.”
”I--I am very much ashamed,” I answered, colouring up, ”but I do not know who St. Sebastian was. Was he a Popish saint?”
A tall, stately old man, who stood with the two ladies, laughed kindly.
”No, not till they made him one against his will; and at the same time, by putting him into the mill which grinds old folks young again, converted him from a grizzled old Roman tribune into the young Apollo of Popery.”
”You will puzzle your hearer, my dear uncle,” said the same deep-toned woman's voice which had first spoken to me. ”As you volunteered the saint's name, Lillian, you shall also tell his history.”
Simply and shortly, with just feeling enough to send through me a fresh thrill of delighted interest, without trenching the least on the most stately reserve, she told me the well known history of the saint's martyrdom.
If I seem minute in my description, let those who read my story remember that such courteous dignity, however natural, I am bound to believe, it is to them, was to me an utterly new excellence in human nature. All my mother's Spartan n.o.bleness of manner seemed unexpectedly combined with all my little sister's careless ease.
”What a beautiful poem the story would make!” said I, as soon as I recovered my thoughts.
”Well spoken, young man,” answered the old gentleman. ”Let us hope that your seeing a subject for a good poem will be the first step towards your writing one.”
As he spoke, he bent on me two clear grey eyes, full of kindliness, mingled with practised discernment. I saw that he was evidently a clergyman; but what his tight silk stockings and peculiar hat denoted I did not know.
There was about him the air of a man accustomed equally to thought, to men, and to power. And I remarked somewhat maliciously, that my cousin, who had strutted up towards us on seeing me talking to two ladies, the instant he caught sight of those black silk stockings and that strange hat, fell suddenly in countenance, and sidling off somewhat meekly into the background, became absorbed in the examination of a Holy Family.
I answered something humbly, I forget what, which led to a conversation.
They questioned me as to my name, my mother, my business, my studies; while I revelled in the delight of stolen glances at my new-found Venus Victrix, who was as forward as any of them in her questions and her interest.
Perhaps she enjoyed, at least she could not help seeing, the admiration for herself which I took no pains to conceal. At last the old man cut the conversation short by a quiet ”Good morning, sir,” which astonished me. I had never heard words whose tone was so courteous and yet so chillingly peremptory. As they turned away, he repeated to himself once or twice, as if to fix them in his mind, my name and my master's, and awoke in me, perhaps too thoughtlessly, a tumult of vain hopes. Once and again the beauty and her companion looked back towards me, and seemed talking of me, and my face was burning scarlet, when my cousin swung up in his hard, off-hand way.
”By Jove, Alton, my boy! you're a knowing fellow. I congratulate you! At your years, indeed! to rise a dean and two beauties at the first throw, and hook them fast!”
”A dean!” I said, in some trepidation.
”Ay, a live dean--didn't you see the cloven foot sticking out from under his shoe-buckle? What news for your mother! What will the ghosts of your grandfathers to the seventh generation say to this, Alton? Colloquing in Pagan picture galleries with shovel-hatted Philistines! And that's not the worst, Alton,” he ran on. ”Those daughters of Moab--those daughters of Moab--.”
”Hold your tongue,” I said, almost crying with vexation.
”Look there, if you want to save your good temper. There, she is looking back again--not at poor me, though. What a lovely girl she is!--and a real lady--_l'air n.o.ble_--the real genuine grit, as Sam Slick says, and no mistake. By Jove, what a face! what hands! what feet! what a figure--in spite of crinolines and all abominations! And didn't she know it? And didn't she know that you knew it too?” And he ran on descanting coa.r.s.ely on beauties which I dared not even have profaned by naming, in a way that made me, I knew not why, mad with jealousy and indignation. She seemed mine alone in all the world. What right had any other human being, above all, he, to dare to mention her? I turned again to my St. Sebastian. That movement only brought on me a fresh volley of banter.
”Oh, that's the dodge, is it, to catch intellectual fine ladies?--to fall into an ecstatic att.i.tude before a picture--But then we must have Alton's genius, you know, to find out which the fine pictures are. I must read up that subject, by-the-by. It might be a paying one among the dons. For the present, here goes in for an att.i.tude. Will this do, Alton?” And he arranged himself admiringly before the picture in an att.i.tude so absurd and yet so graceful, that I did not know whether to laugh at him or hate him.