by George Moore
“In saying that, we are saying nothing,” Lewis interjected, “that we have not said before. We are agreed that the Decameron is mere folk, whereas the art of antiquity was always conscious, and never more so than in the very beautiful story of Daphnis and Chloe — the last effort, so the critics tell, of Greek genius. Some attribute the story to the second, some to the ninth, century. It may be that I shall find my subject in that story.” And they went over the story together, reminding each other of component parts. Like the Golden Ass, it rose out of an incident, almost as conventional as the transformation of a man into an ass. A goatherd notices that a certain she-goat escapes from the flock again and again into a copse. He follows the goat, and finds her giving suck to a male child. In another part of the island a shepherd notices that a ewe escapes from the flock into a dingle. He follows the ewe, and finds her giving suck to a female child. These children are brought home by their respective finders, and as they grow into girl-and boyhood they lead their flocks through the hills. There is a fountain in the island, and the nymphs carven upon the rocks stir their childish imaginations, setting them wondering; and Daphnis’s back, when he bathes in the fountain, seems to Chloe the most beautiful thing in all the world, and Chloe’s beauty does not seem less to Daphnis.
“It is extraordinary how little one remembers of what one reads,” Lewis said; “and yet one remembers intensely. I have an intense memory of an old shepherd whom Daphnis and Chloe consulted concerning love. He said many profound and witty things, I am certain, though I cannot recall one; and I am also sure that his counsels were not sufficient, Daphnis and Chloe being too young at that time to rightly understand him, though they longed to understand; and for a more explicit telling of love’s procedure, you remember, Lucy, the interest with which they watched the mating of the ram with the ewe, of the he-goat with the she-goat. But so innocent are they in their teens, that we have only in this period an account of their kisses under the rocks. And perhaps the incident that releases them from their innocence is one that everybody knows: painters, men of letters, women of the world, all, for some reason or another — all have read or have been told how in some further embarrassment of Daphnis and Chloe, a married woman — the wife probably of one of the shepherds — came to ask for Daphnis’s help. An eagle had carried off one of her lambs, and would he follow her? which he did, she talking the whole time to him of the lamb which they would rescue; but as soon as they reach a secluded dell she tells him that she had overheard all his talk with Chloe and witnessed their embraces. The words are so well chosen that one regrets that the ancient writers did not introduce more dialogue into their narratives. Do you remember?” And Lucy said she thought that the married woman told Daphnis that she was once as innocent as he and Chloe, but had learnt what love was from a married man, and would teach him in her turn.
“And then,” Lewis cried, “comes one of the most beautiful touches in the story. Daphnis is about to run away at once to Chloe, fearing he might forget his lesson, but he is stopped by the married woman with these words: ‘Remember, Daphnis, always, that it was not Chloe that taught you love, but I.’ After which words she permits him to return to Chloe. And now again comes one of the most beautiful touches, one which shows we have learnt nothing during the last eighteen hundred years. I am assuming, you see, that the story was written in the second century. Daphnis returns to Chloe, but he doesn’t practise upon her the art that he has learnt from the married woman, for they are engaged to be married, and he thinks it will be as well to wait till then for the consummation of their loves. The next incident is the rape of Chloe by pirates, and nothing in the story is more delightful than the relation of Daphnis’s grief; his raving along the coasts and through the woods, his prayers that Pan and the other gods may intervene to rescue Chloe. It is all so untrue and yet so true. And truth in untruth is the essence of art, an essence which we shall never reach again, but which Greece attained in this last effort of her genius. By the intervention of the gods the pirates are shipwrecked.”
“Isn’t there a meeting of Daphnis and Chloe on the shore?” Lucy asked. “Didn’t Daphnis lead Chloe up the hills into the woods from the sea?”
“Of course he did,” Lewis answered — he couldn’t have done else, yet one barely remembers.” And then they spoke of the incident that sets the seal of genius upon the story — the love of the steward who comes with his master, who owns the island, to see if his flocks have prospered.
“It was a disappointment to me to hear that Daphnis and Chloe are slaves,” Lucy said; “and the turn the story takes is certainly unexpected; it is not Chloe that the steward seeks, but Daphnis. A modern writer would have sought to interest the reader by a story of ordinary revelry. With this incident the author includes all human love within the circuit of history.” Lewis agreed that there is something in ancient art that escapes the modern sense, and he asked Lucy if anything in literature was more remarkable than Daphnis’s appeal to the master of the island to save him from the steward. “Do you remember, Lucy, the last line of the story, exquisite in its humanity, is the remark that on their wedding night the lovers understood that all they had done in the woods was but child’s play. For centuries this story has been the admiration of scholars.”
“You know, Lewis, that the most beautiful translation of this story was done by a Frenchman — Bishop Amyot.” And they began to talk of the extraordinary incident that befell the story. Three pages were missing from all the copies that came down to us, till one day in the beginning of this century a Frenchman discovered a complete copy in Florence. He made a transcript of the pages and then upset his ink-bottle over them, destroying them completely. Lewis, who heard the story for the first time, held that Paul Louis Courier destroyed the pages in order that his name might be preserved; but Lucy inclined to the belief that he wrote the missing pages himself, translated them, and died without yielding up his secret, knowing that it would breathe in the minds of posterity an irresistible curiosity that time would never blot out.
“It cannot be that he knew Greek well enough to deceive scholars. Could any Englishman write three pages into Mademoiselle de Maupin that the least critical would accept as Gautier’s?”
Lucy answered that it did not seem possible. She suggested Swinburne when he was very young. Lewis shook his head, and a long silence fell between them.
“I’m beginning to see them: Daphnis bathing in the fountain, and Chloe admiring his back. Beginning to see them as a picture.”
And as he sat thinking of the picture, Lucy told him of Goethe’s admiration for the Greek story. He listened, hearing her as one hears when one lies between sleeping and waking; and then rising from his chair, he walked out on to the balcony.
“The Vale is an ideal spot in which to illustrate Daphnis and Chloe. But before beginning a series of drawings I must concentrate on Daphnis and Chloe in the cave. It will he difficult to get a model. Chloe was about thirteen or fourteen when she admired Daphnis’s back. No, she wasn’t so old as that; they were children of seven or eight — too young for drawing. In my picture they must be nine or ten, eleven or twelve.”
He did not ask Lucy’s opinion, but passed by her into the low-ceilinged room, wainscoted with apple-green panels, and upon a satinwood table fell to sketching. “The first draft of my composition,” he said, showing her a rough outline.
“It is charming,” she replied, leaning over him. “The only thing I fear is a lack of perseverance.”
“No one is more patient than I am, but till we spoke of Daphnis and Chloe I hadn’t an idea in my head. Tomorrow I must make some drawings, for you know, dearest, whether a composition be good or bad depends upon the drawing one gets into it. I will work at the composition this evening after dinner”; and he was glad to hear her say that she must return home. Her visit had been a pleasant one, and it was pleasant, too, to lead her out of the Vale into the King’s Road, and to put her into a carriage, and to say: “Well, I hope to be able to show you the composit
ion in a day or two.”
A moment after she was gone, and he returned to the house absorbed in his picture.
CHAP. XXIV.
THE SKETCH SEEMED to represent the text — a cave in which there was a fountain and some statues of nymphs. But he had already begun to ask himself if the nymphs engraved upon the rock were has-reliefs or statues. “Bas-reliefs,” he said. Statues mean pedestals, and dismissing pedestals from his mind, he considered the size of the fountain. It must be large enough to bathe in, which presented a difficulty; and to reconcile himself to a small fountain, he remembered that the boats in Raphael’s Miraculous Draught of Fishes were not large enough to contain a single figure, and Raphael had placed several in the same boat. The boats were symbolical, and his fountain, too, would he symbolical of a pool in which two figures might swim about. He need not introduce the whole of the pool; a corner would suffice — a flash of water amid the rocks. A more serious difficulty presented itself when he began his studies from the life. The model could not take the pose he had imagined, and when he got her brother to pose with her, he failed to place them in attitudes that even recalled his composition. She was a well-proportioned girl, and fell into very pretty poses naturally, from which it would be easy to pick and choose, but it required a very special talent to show the girl how to fit herself into a pose already designed — the pose in the composition.
A man he had known in Paris was very clever in choosing a model who could fit herself into a pose that the artist had created out of his imagination. With a cushion here and a book there, he succeeded in getting the pose. And Lewis wondered how it was he could not manage it. He tried another model, but could not get her to take the pose that the first model had given him. A very little difference in the proportion of the limbs of the body was enough to change everything. How was it to be managed? Michael Angelo knew how Nature was made, and could out of his knowledge create Nature, and Boucher, on a much lower scale, had learned Nature so well that he could dispense with a model, so it was said. He, too, could dispense with a model. An occasional look at an engraving here and there was sufficient to enable him to decorate a ballroom with nymphs and Cupids; but the present task was a different one, and if he could not get the models into the poses that he designed, he would have to draw Kitty and her brother in the attitude that they fell into naturally. They were both well-proportioned, and the group would appear of itself just as a beautiful cloud shape appears, if you wait for it long enough.
“I must read them the passage.” And opening the book, he applied all his mind to the comprehension of the passage that he wished to illustrate: “Hee then fared to the founte in thoughte to washe his long blacke hair and his bodie all sun embrouned, yet might men deem his hue caused of the shadowing Trefoures of his haire. Fair he seemed to Chloe in his bathe, wherein she seeing him for the first demed him therefrom to haue come by his fairness. And whenas she laued his backe and shoulders eke his fleshe yeeled tender to hir touche: therewith him all unwittynge shee felt hire owne skinne ofte, in mynde to proue whether of the two was softer. Phebus now declining, they draue theyr flockes togithers to foldwarde, Chloes onlie wishing beeing to viewe Daphnis bath again.”
“All that I have to illustrate is in that passage,” he said to himself, and, the book closed, he sat with his eyes fixed, thinking how he might paint two figures, if by chance his models gave him a group; if not the group that he saw in his imagination, a group that corresponded to it — an equivalent group. “How was it lighted?” he asked himself, and how in a room with four windows would he get the atmosphere, the pale twilight of the cave? The cave might be open overhead, and the light might fall through implicated leaves; a Shelley-like cave it might be, one of the caves in the Prometheus. But these caves recalled pictures of Mantegna and Botticelli, fresco-coloured drawings rather than pictures. Chiaroscuro was unknown to them. Beautiful pictures had been painted in that manner, but the manner was archaic. “All modern art is an appreciation of values, different degrees of illumination, and were I,” he said, “to conceive the cave lighted from above, a ray of light falling through a cleft in the rocks, the problem would be for Rembrandt. Now, which is my picture to be? A fresco according to Mantegna, a Botticelli, or a mystery of light and shade according to Rembrandt?” His heart misgave him, and he asked himself if it were possible that, after all, he was not a painter. “If not a painter, what then?”
A knock came at the door — it was Kitty; and all day he drew her pretty figure in different poses, and the drawings seemed to him not without merit, but he was puzzled as to what use he was going to put them to. The next day she brought her brother with her, and he sketched some pretty groups, but they bore no resemblance to his composition, nor did they seem to him to be in keeping with the text that he had proposed to illustrate.
His models left him, but they were to come again, and next day he made further drawings, and the day after, drawings of legs, drawings of hands, drawings of heads, of backs, of shoulders. There was nothing he did not draw, but his drawings were not of any use to him. Now it was the sister that inspired the hope, now it was the brother. For half an hour his soul was on fire, and then the fire died down, and at the end of the day his heart was cold ashes again.
CHAP. XXV.
A MONTH WENT by, and no progress was made. He had tried three or four more models, but the drawings he did were of no more use to him than those he did from Kitty and her brother. He dreamed of another studio and relinquished his dreams; but one day Kitty, seeing him overcome with despair, deep in silence, put out her naked foot and pushed him gently. A painter in his discouragement is an easy victim to the model, and he took her on his knee and kissed her, and thanked her for her sympathy, for he was very unhappy. But his eyes, happening to go round the room at that moment, he remembered that everything in it, and the house itself, had been given to him by Lucy; and his debt was so great that he felt that he must not deceive her. If she were to come into the room and find him kissing his model, it would cut her to the heart. So he put Kitty away, allowing as he did so his hand to linger, toying with a plait of hair for a moment, and then telling her that he was not free, but should he ever find himself free he would be glad if they could return to this moment. Her eyes were very winning, and when she had gone he remembered them, and fell to thinking that all this debt he had incurred to Lucy must be repaid. But how was it to be repaid? His picture had gone wrong, and could not be put right, he was striving for something he would never reach. “Poor little Kitty! It was a feeling of kindness for one whom she could see was suffering that had induced her to put out her foot,” he said as he prepared the tea for Lucy, whom he expected, while hoping to get a telegram from her, saying that she was prevented from coming to see him.
He was expecting Lucy. Even loneliness was better than her company this afternoon. She would be certain to ask him to show her the picture, to bring out all his drawings, every one of which was a failure from his point of view; and feeling that the interview would he unbearable, he began to think it might be better to send her a telegram, saying that he had to go out. But whither should he go? It seemed to him that he was the unhappiest man in the world, and while trying to measure his unhappiness, he remembered that if he did not send a telegram she would be knocking at his door in another hour, asking him how he was getting on with his picture, and if he confessed failure he’d have to listen to vain consolations: and if he showed her the picture he felt that all hope would be gone. He’d never touch it again.... He fell into a reverie and awoke unhappier than before. Another hour had joined the past, and he strove to rise out of his chair. But if he sent the telegram he would have to sit thinking alone in his studio, and if he didn’t, Lucy would take him out for a drive, and he’d forget his failure... for the time. “Another half-hour will have to pass away,” he said, and he went to the window to wait. “Ah, here she comes,” and he planned an answer to her question. But the question was never put.