by George Moore
And becoming interested in this strange painter, whose handicraft was sufficient (when it was his) to keep the legend out of sight, and to charm us with the beauty of the thing represented, Helen asked Lewis to tell her some story relating to his life. Lewis answered her that, just as harsh winds lurk about the frontiers of spring ready to cut down the blossom, so it is in the lives of men; and he told her how Botticelli’s art had been blighted by the influence of a monk, one named Savonarola, who hated the spring days and all their concomitants — laughter, dancing, kisses, and wine; one who sought to drive the world back unto prayers and repentance; and Botticelli would have destroyed his picture of Venus returning from the underworld if it had not passed out of his possession. “His last years, Helen, were spent thinking how he might save his soul depicting Dante’s hell.”
“How wonderful!” Helen cried; and encouraged by the interest she showed in his words, Lewis spoke of the great Pope that had lived at that time, Alexander VI. “ one,” he said, “who knew that the world had had enough of the Middle Ages; and fearing lest the friar’s influence might bring about a revival of them, he signed the decree for his burning with three disciples.”
“But, Lewis, you said that no man is conscious of the value and the potency of the circumstances amid which he lives. Do you believe that Alexander VI. was an exception, and that he foresaw in Savonarola a return to childishness?”
Lewis answered her, saying that we do not know what is passing in the heart of her who is talking to us. “How, then,” he asked, “can we tell what passed in the heart of a man who died four hundred years ago? But this we do know — that he burnt Savonarola and his disciples with him.” And the twain passed on to Titian, who, Lewis said, had been from the beginning enchanted and beguiled by his vision of women’s curving bodies. He laid his vision down in open landscapes, whither satyrs came from neighbouring thickets, and in richly tapestried saloons, on couches spread with fine linen, where lying at length she could listen at ease to the music a young man was playing on an organ. In another picture, by the same master, two women listen by a well to the tinkling of a guitar that accompanies the song of some entreating cavalier. Sexual reveries, Lewis averred these pictures to be; beautiful, of course; yet he could not help feeling that the great painter had pursued a fleeting phantom, till in a sudden detachment of the senses he saw two women seated, one on the ground clad in great robes, the other naked on the edge of the well, poised in a movement lyrical as a swallow’s flight. The picture has been named, he said, “Sacred and Profane Love,” which shows how little the art of painting may be understood, for it is certain that Titian’s mind, while painting this picture, was possessed only of a pure desire to represent life in all its fulness and beauty — the divine essence rather than the actual manifestation. “Dearest Lewis,” Helen murmured; and Lewis asked her if it were not a temptation to believe that while painting this picture Titian had looked back to Botticelli’s timid Venus, saying to himself, “His was the bud, mine is the blown flower.”
In works of the highest inspiration, Lewis said, the artist is always detached from his subject. He was moved to think this detachment the supreme inspiration, and he spoke again of the women couchant and sleeping, Titian’s or Giorgione’s, no matter which, as sexual reveries, whereas in the figure beside the well there is nothing personal. By nothing personal he meant that it contained nothing of the artist’s daily nature, but was lifted above it, beyond his desires, his dreams, beyond even his aspirations. And it being within the schemes of Providence to see woman glorified at that moment, Titian was chosen as her mouthpiece. We may therefore admire and ponder on this picture, but we should not try to seek a meaning that may be confined to words and phrases.
.. The meaning of a great picture is in the heart; it speaks to an inner sense, like flowers; “it rises to the condition of music”; and the Renaissance, having obtained from Titian a representation of woman in the fulness and perfection of her beauty, did not seek again to inspire an artist in that direction. “Nature,” he affirmed, “never repeats itself.” And he reminded Helen that Raphael had continued the pagan tradition of the Renaissance, painting his mistress as Mary Mother, surrounding her with beautiful children, so that she might seem more beautiful, creating a new type of woman, but no supreme song like the woman at the well. Lewis thought awhile, and admitted that he could not remember a Venus among Raphael’s works. “There is,” he said, “the Galatea; but we may pass her by, and say that the desire to represent abstract beauty seems to have faded from man’s mind, till it was revived by Ingres in a pose invented by him, or gathered from a Greek vase and modified to his own purpose.” He asked Helen what age she would put upon the child from whose shoulder water flows from the canted urn. Helen answered about fifteen; but to Lewis she represented a child of thirteen or fourteen — not more than fourteen. “A child of fourteen,” he said, “seen with the mind’s eye”; and on these words he lay back in his chair so that he might think better. “Yes,” he said, “there is one more Venus. Ingres’s pupil, his follower, his disciple, Cabanel, certainly devised a Venus — a Parisian Venus, but still a Venus and he described to Helen the woman that the wave carries up on to the shore vibrating from the distended toe to the arm outstretched beyond the head, the fingers twisted in the coils of hair. “The left arm is thrown across her face, and out of its shadow we see the laughing face — laughing at what? At the wives weeping on the shore, Swinburne would have us think. Be this as it may, it is a perfect illustration of the lines:
‘A perilous goddess was born
Of sea-foam and the frothing of blood.’
The Cupids with which he has filled the air, rejoicing and blowing conch shells, do not draw attention from the woman’s beauty. His subject was woman’s beauty in all its attributes and perfections, and it might have been better to let the single figure tell its own story. Cabanel was not as great an artist as Ingres. Lefebvre, who used to correct in the school in the Passage des Panoramas, painted a woman afloat in a cloud — a beautiful pose, a lovely idea, but insufficiently executed. As I said this morning, a man, if he perceives the beauty of the human form, is crazed with it, just as men who hear sounds are crazed with music, and never happy except when admiring it. I am like that, Helen, and I beg of you to take off those vain garments, for I would continue the sketches that I began this morning.”
“But you began them in my bedroom,” she said, “and Polly cannot endure you in my bedroom. She is like that with everybody she loves, Kate tells me, but quite possibly in any other room—”
“Then I will draw you in this room.”
“But somebody will come in, Lewis, I”
“No, we can lock the door.”
“Wait till I fetch Polly”; and Helen went out and brought the bird back with her cooing softly and climbing up the cage for Helen to scratch her head.
“I think the bird should remain in her cage, or it will be impossible for me to draw.”
“She’ll not attack you,” she answered, “if you don’t come too near me,” and she took out the bird and allowed Polly to climb on to her shoulder.
“Polly! Your claws are too sharp, Polly! I shall have to put you back into your cage.”
“It’s a pity the bird is so savage,” Lewis said; “with a more docile parrot I might discover a pose; put her back into her cage and lean over it with a piece of apricot between your teeth.”
“Beauty and the bird,” she said; “do you remember Rossetti’s sonnet?” He was too busy drawing to remember sonnets, and when Helen could keep the pose no longer he said that without the bird he might discover a pose that expressed Helen. He could do nothing as long as the bird was present.
She said she would keep the bird quiet, and he answered that it was not the bird’s restlessness, but the bird herself. “You see, Helen, the subject is you, not you and the bird. I must get another piece of paper.”
“You’ll shut the door after you. I’ll lock it to make sure and open it to
three knocks.”
“Well, I wasn’t long,” he said. “I hope Mrs. Cartwright won’t mind my using her things”; and he sat down in front of a drawing-board on which he had pinned a sheet of Whatman.
“Move about,” he said; “don’t think of me. I shall see something presently”; and he watched her figure, “a sort of visible music,” it seemed to him to be, and it was not long before she took a pose that was very nearly what he was seeking for; he had caught her leaning against a cabinet on which stood a large majolica vase, and remembering at the same moment the youth gathering grapes in the Botticelli picture, he said to himself: “That vase shall be the god Pan.”
“Now, Helen, drop the right leg and stand on the left: raise your hand to gather fruit in the vine above your head. I think I’ve got the pose,” he said, “in which all your beauty appears. Some silken folds about the dropping knee and thigh will add to it. A goblet in your right hand, into which you will squeeze the juice of the grapes, will explain the idea. My idea of you transpires in that pose. Now, before we lose it. Don’t try to hold up your hand any longer; you will tire yourself. I must give you something to hold on to by to-morrow, a string fixed somewhere. Now, don’t move for ten minutes; ten minutes are all I ask.” At the end of ten minutes he asked her if she could hold up her hand to gather the grapes that were supposed to be growing on the trellis above her. She raised her arm, and he said: “How long can you hold it so?”
“Two or three minutes, perhaps,” she answered; and he said that three or four minutes would be long enough.
CHAP. XXXI.
AS A HOLE could not be bored through the ceiling to let a cord through for Helen to hold on by, a carpenter was sent for, and after a great deal of talk he seemed to understand what was required, and returned with an upright and a cross-beam with a hook in it, to which he attached a piece of rope. The upright was placed against the wall, and the rope fell over Helen’s shoulder.
“He isn’t such a fool as we thought he was,” Lewis whispered to Helen.
“You see, sir, it is quite strong. The lady needn’t be afraid to cling on by it.”
“I believe he thinks you are an acrobat,” Lewis said as soon as the carpenter left the room. “And now, Helen, we’ll begin.” And he began what is known in the schools as an “academy,” which he said he would square out on to a canvas. Three-quarters of an hour passed away, and so absorbed was he in his work that he did not see that Helen was losing consciousness.
“Those who aren’t used to sitting...” he said. “I should have been more watchful.”
“Get me a little water; I shall be all right presently, and bring me a shawl.”
After half an hour’s rest she resumed the pose and was able to hold it for about twenty minutes longer.
“I’ve done pretty well,” he said; “three-quarters of an hour and twenty minutes — an hour and five minutes in all. All the movement is there, and the proportions, I think; we shall see to-morrow how it works out. And now, Helen, dear, get on your clothes, and I will take you for a row on the river. And while you are dressing I will write to London for a canvas. You are five feet seven, and there must be six inches at the bottom of the canvas and eighteen at the top. I shall require an eight-foot canvas. If there is too much, a piece can be taken off. It is easier to take off a piece than to add one. Eight feet by five feet. If you’ll sit to-morrow for three halfhours, I shall be quite sure of my drawing, and to complete the drawing, to get all the modelling, a drawing from which I shall be able to paint, three or four more sittings will be required. But I shall have to make a separate drawing of the head.”
“But will you put my head upon this figure?”
Lewis said he had only been thinking of the picture as a work of art, without a thought of the conventional proprieties; and later in the afternoon, while paddling up and down the river from lock to lock, they talked of the picture in the making — how the drawing had come right from the very first, the movement and the proportions. Her figure had inspired him as he expected it would. He had always wished to draw from somebody like her, and at last he had found his model. The only point he had any doubt about was the drapery. Without some drapery the picture would seem a little naked. All the old masters painted draperies from their drawings, and after the sitting they went up to London to seek for some soft silken OT satin material that would reveal rather than hide the shape of the limb.
And the very stuff needed to clothe Helen’s thigh with elegance was caught sight of in a shop window. Her arm upheld this fortuitous drapery, in the representation of which Lewis expected to meet with many checks. But he met with none; fold after fold came together, and stepping back so that he might obtain a better view of his work, he said: “Halcyon days! But beneath this calm a storm may be brewing.”
Helen answered that one must not foresee misfortune, “else it will come and her words seemed to Lewis like a prophecy, for at the end of the week they were fulfilled.
He took up his palette one morning with reluctance, feeling that some of the life of the picture had fled from it during the night. He could put on paint here and there, but his brush could not create; and feeling that he was merely daubing canvas he said to Helen: “I’m feeling a little stale. I’d like to put this picture aside for a day or two, and to draw you in some other pose in the interval. There is one that remains in my mind, the parrot walking up the bed to nestle herself under your chin. There was a pretty movement in the arm: we spoke of la chemise volée.” He would like to do a drawing, a pastel, a water-colour. He might see the Bacchante in a different light to-morrow.
The hope took him out of bed next morning quickly. He was loath to leave his bed to see his picture, but there was no help for it. After all, there was nothing derogatory to Helen in the action. Helen was his picture, and his picture was Helen; and with these excuses on his lips, he hurried to a great disappointment. His picture seemed to him more trite and commonplace than it had done the day before, and falling into his chair he sat with his back to his picture, his heart brimmed with melancholy. And seeing what had befallen him, Helen declared the picture to be a masterpiece, and he put some vine leaves in her hair: he thought these an improvement. But next day he took them out, and his discontent finding its way into Helen’s mind, she wearied of the labour of sitting, and said:
“Lewis, don’t you think it is time we were married?”
“Of course I do, Helen. I’ve thought so all along”; and then, feeling that he must not betray too much enthusiasm for marriage, lest she should come to look upon his picture as a failure, he suffered his voice to drop into a soberer tone. “We’ve been here now nearly three weeks,” he said, “and how would it be for our future if we were discovered here?” He regretted his words, feeling they had let out to her his moral cowardice. “She is turning me over in her mind,” he said to himself; but in truth she was not thinking of him at all, but of a letter to her father, which she would write after the wedding.
“There must he a registry office in Twickenham,” she said, and they went out to seek one after luncheon; and finding one, were told that if they had lived in the district fifteen days, and gave notice that day, they could he married the day after to-morrow by special licence. They were told that, being British subjects, there would be no necessity for them to procure birth certificates, “which was,” Helen said, and Lewis agreed with her, “very lucky,” for it would take a long time before they could produce theirs.
Very little more was said during the course of their walk to “The Willows,” and the next day Lewis could not paint. Nor could he draw; and when Helen asked him the cause of his disquiet he said: “We are about to take a great step; everything will be different to-morrow when we return from that little office....” He stopped suddenly, and she answered that it would be pleasant being married, settling up with her father and mother, who she had no doubt would condone her conduct; and imperceptibly their talk glided into dreams of how their life would plan out, and how they would ma
nage it. “Something might happen yet to prevent our marriage,” Helen said. Lewis wondered at her audacity; but nothing happened, and they returned to “The Willows,” having come to a decision that for the time being they could not do better than to live in the Vale.
“You like the house?” Lewis said, and she answered that she did, but she would miss the parrot.
“That horrid bird that bit my ear,” Lewis interjected, but their laughter was forced. Already they were conscious that they were no longer the same as they were yesterday. It seemed that marriage had even changed their identities. Each was conscious of another self and of another attitude towards life, and life seemed to have changed towards them. All reality seemed to have passed out of “The Willows,” just as it had out of the picture. Helen suggested that they should remain so, so that Lewis might finish his picture; but Lewis did not know how long it would take to finish it. “You see, a picture of those dimensions would take a long time. Perhaps if it was laid aside and taken up again it would be better.”
“Have you got any orders?” she asked, and the question made plain the new relations they had entered into one to the other. His money was her money, her money was his. She had five hundred a year of her own, which was fortunate, for he could not support her upon his painting in any way in which she would be content to live. There was Carver’s portrait, which he would have to begin the moment he returned to London. He wrote to him asking when he would be able to sit, informing him at the same time of his marriage; and when they arrived at the Vale it was pleasing to find several presents from the Carver family. One had sent him a Rockingham tea-service—” A very pretty one, too,” he said; “I saw it in the shop.” Mrs. Carver sent Lady Helen a French clock — two nude figures on either side, the woman showing a back view very modestly, the man bending over the clock to whisper the time in her ear.