CHAPTER 10.

            ‘WHO is coming with me to see the Vatican by torchlight, this evening?’ asked Sophia next morning. ‘You will all come, will you not?’

            ‘You must excuse me, my dear,’ said Lady Bevan.

            ‘But I shall excuse no one else, not even you, Margaret, for I see you are quite well to-day, and I should like to see you among the statues by torchlight. Of course, gentlemen, you will come, though I must make a bargain with James that he does not behave so ill as he has been in the habit of doing whenever we have been sight-seeing together, or he will quite shock the goodies of the party. Only think,’ added she to Noel, ‘how horrified some English clergymen must have been whom we found looking at the Apollo Belvedere, when he said aloud, as if for their benefit, in the grave tone of one lecturing students, – “Here you see a higher revelation of Deity to the pagans of antiquity than any that has been attained by the orthodox of our own time. We are taught to believe in a God who is baffled, and contends; who sacrifices, and strives; and who, after all his efforts, achieves but a partial success, and that at a huge cost. Whereas the maker of the Apollo rightly conceived of the divine as Power without effort. He represents him as a man in order to be intelligible to men, but a man that is also God in his ineffable calmness and grace. He destroys his enemy by a glance of his eye.” And when we visited Gibson’s studio he broke out into a tirade against the artist’s practice of tinting his statues, telling him that the sculptor’s

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sole business is with Form, and that he ought to leave Colour to the painter; and asked him what he would think of a painter who should trench upon the sculptor’s province, and say he could not paint properly on a flat surface. “And why that only?” he asked. “Why not add wig and glass eyes? If you go so far, why stop there? The fabricator of the hairdresser’s dummy would hesitate to desecrate such beautiful and imperishable material by staining it. Rather would he hang on it placard, as they used to do in the old plays for lack of scenery, and label the various parts, Here are the eyes,’ or ‘Here is the hair.’ No, sir, such blasphemy against your art speaks you no true instructor of mankind.” For once the poor old man was dumbfounded. I don’t believe he will ever recover it.’

            ‘I am afraid I was rather abrupt,’ said Maynard, ‘but I really was angry to see such splendid talent marred by such low conceits. lf anybody had had the courage to say the same thing to him twenty years before, Gibson would have blessed him for ever afterwards. The fact is, he has been misled by examples belonging to a degenerate period, and has, like a good many others in other lines, mistaken decay for maturity.’

            ‘Well, in that instance you may have been genuine in your utterances; at any rate I quite agreed with you. But how are we to reconcile the different views you expressed at the other two studios we visited the same day? Would you believe it, Edmund, he went into one where all was classic, Greek, and nude, and inveighed against the practice of copying other ages and ignoring our own? “If you must imitate the ancients,” he said, “imitate them in this, in describing what you see. You don’t see people going about without clothes now-a-days. Spectators can’t even judge whether you are true to life, for the habits of the times give no opportunity of studying the human anatomy. You are appealing to an audience that is altogether incapable of comprehending you. You are as bad as the theologians. There is no God or Beauty for you in the world now. They are banished to a distant past, and must be dug out of an ancient grave. If our present costumes are ungraceful and hideous, so much the more reason to let people see what they make of themselves If you really would earn the gratitude of your species, lose no time in making a Colossus, or Colossa, in Crinoline, – say a statue of the French Empress, or our own Queen; and expose it aloft in some conspicuous place. Perhaps

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the shame of letting posterity know how we looked, would make us more careful in our fashions.” And then he went into another, where everything was in modern style, and said just the opposite. I remember his exact words, for I wrote it all down when I got home, as I always do when I hear anything worth remembering. He spoke more quietly, as if his mood of opposition had nearly worked itself out, and said to the artist, though in a sarcastic tone that made me suspect his seriousness, – “You take people with their clothes on so well as to make me wish you had adopted a more classic style. It is such a relief in there days, when all Europe wears clothes, to see something like real humanity occasionally. It must be the highest aim of art to represent, not so much what we appear to be, as what we are, or ought to be; our better solves rather than our accidental envelopes. There is no mightier agent in man’s redemption than a glimpse of the beautiful and the true.” What provoked me was to find that however flatly he contradicted himself, I always agreed with him.’

            ‘You cannot have a better test of truth,’ said James, laughing heartily at the vivacity of her narration. It shows it to be truth all round, and not merely on one Look from whichever way you may, you see the same mountain of Truth, various in its aspects as any mountain of hills; yet the same mountain always.’

            ‘Was that the way he behaved when you first saw Rome with him, Margaret?’

            ‘I do not think I ever saw Rome with him before,’ she said, shaking her head doubtfully.

            They looked inquiringly at her, and she added, –

            ‘It was quite a different sort of person who first opened Rome and its meaning to me. James will scarcely deny that.’

            ‘It is possible,’ he said, ‘that one of us has undergone a change; but if the effect is on one side, the cause is probably on the other.’

            Here Sophia created a diversion, saying that she and Margaret were going to visit the graves of Keats and Shelley in the English cemetery, and asking who would accompany them.

            ‘I think Noel and I can spend our time better than among tombs; said Maynard; but there is no reason why you should not seek exhilaration there. Shelley was a nuble young fellow, but very crude and wild; and Keats was very morbid.’

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            Here a visitor was announced, an old habitué of Roma. On hearing the subject of discussion, he at once volunteered to accompany the two ladies. This set Maynard and Noel free; and they went out together on a quest more interesting to them than that of modern epitaphs, for they were bent upon tracing the resemblance between certain Mexican and Roman antiquities, with a view to obtaining light concerning the identity in origin or principle subsisting between the primitive religious ideas of the two worlds, the old and the new; and tracing step by step both backwards and forwards the real history of the Dogma of 1854; a dogma which, in James’s view, was a leading article in that system of eclecticism which had been growing from before the days of Zoroaster and Melchisedek, until it culminated in modern Catholicism.

            ‘Well, gentlemen,’ was Sophia’s greeting when they re-assembled for dinner; ‘we have to thank you for a most admirable chaperon. There is such a charming comer in the cemetery that Margaret took quite a fancy for being buried there; but it is tenanted already, Mr. said, by a young Englishman who had taken a like fancy to it, and determined to purchase the spot for himself, but found it was already disposed of to some one who had been similarly affected. Well, the young Englishman, who had a reputation for singular self-will and eccentricity, gave the owner no peace until he consented to an agreement that it should be the property of whichever of them died first. And next day he went out hunting and was killed, as if for the express purpose of making his purchase available. Mr. F–– told us a story of him, which makes such a supposition quite possible. Being remonstrated with once by a friend for some extravagance of behaviour, he said, –

            ‘ “The doctors assure me that I have dislocated or cracked one of the vertebrae in my neck, by a fall in hunting, and that if I turn my head suddenly I shall probably drop down dead. New I tell you what it is; I don’t like being spoken to as you have just spoken to me; and if you do so again, I will turn my head suddenly and will drop down dead, and my death shall lie at your door.” And those who knew him say there is no reason to doubt that he would have kept his word.’

            ‘It might be a useful faculty,’ remarked Maynard, ‘to be able to terminate one’s existence at will; – but I suspect that the world would be very soon depopulated if men found that they could escape from a chagrin so readily.’

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            ‘It is a horrible story,’ said Margaret; ‘but I hope that no one would be deterred from performing a duty and administering a friendly rebuke or remonstrance by such a threat. The death would not have lain at the friend’s door; neither would it have imposed any responsibility or obligation towards the other’s memory. The very barbarism of the act would acquit of that.’

            Maynard said, in a somewhat hesitating, awkward way, that eccentricity might approach so nearly to insanity as to make it difficult to decide the responsibility of a man under such circumstances; and while Sophia was struck with painful amazement at the matured and decided character of the opinion expressed by Margaret, Noel saw in it a proof of unabated bitterness in her relations with James.

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