Delphi Complete Works of Rhoda Broughton Illustrated

CHAPTER I.

"A THING OF beauty is a joy for ever." That is my text for this chapter, and my service is going to be an amplification and enlarging upon that idea. Keats meant it in a purely material sense, for his intense perception of the beautiful was confined to material objects; but I, having adopted it for my motto, intend it to be taken in a nobler, wider, more spiritual sense. The subject I am going to write about is to my mind "a thing of beauty;" for what is more preëminently so than a tender, "loving, passionate, human soul, made more tender, more loving, by many a sore grief," by many a gnawing sorrow, till towards the hour of its setting, whether calm or whelmed to the last in storm-clouds, it shines with a chaste mellow radiance such as our earth lamps do not afford us here, borrowed (oh, priceless loan!) from the fountains of light above? Love in such a soul, growing purified from the drossy, worthless part of earthly passion which oftentimes forms the largest share of it, is raised higher and higher above this world's low level, above its dull swampy flats, till it merges in that better, boundless love which is the essence of the Deity, a love free from the sharp sting of disappointment, free from the mortal taint of satiety, and which decay is powerless to soil with its foul, polluting fingers.

Even taking it in its narrow material sense, I agree very fully and heartily with the sentiment of Keats' suggestive line, and thank him most humbly and sincerely for saying for me, so pithily and concisely, what I should never have been able to say so well for myself. Yes! I subscribe to the opinion of that born Greek, whom some anachronism isolated from his kin and his country, and set amongst uncongenial money-making Britons, full twenty centuries too late. I subscribe to it; but yet I know, on the other hand, that we all learned, on no less authority than the copy-books, which exercised our powers of handwriting in the days of our hard-worked, highly educated youth, that "Beauty is a fading flower;" and, applied particularly to woman's loveliness, there is none more favourite among that bundle of dull platitudes, of insipid, trite commonplaces which enrol themselves under the head of moral maxims. Of course it is true - tiresomely, provokingly, heart-breakingly true; so true as to be almost a self-evident proposition. Which of you, O daughters of Eve! has not made this interesting discovery in natural history for yourself, by one or other of the following pleasant processes? Either, standing after the manner of your kind, considering your tout ensemble, in that teller of such gall-bitter, such treacle-sweet truths, your looking-glass, you make the discovery, some fine day, that you have lost your most effective, aggressive weapon against mankind. Your little sword is dinted; your pretty arrows have lost their points; your power is gone from you. Disarmed you stand there; like "brave Kempenfelt," your "victories are o'er," and very ruefully you have to own to yourself that your soft, much prized fascinations, which, perchance, made your small world so cheery a place, have gone away from you, never to come back again any more. "Eheu fugaces!" They have slipped away, treacherous ones, out of your reluctant clasp, "most cunningly did steal away," as is the wont of the brief good things of this troublesome world of ours, leaving us very heart bare, and sore, and grumbling; none the worse, perhaps, for that at last. Or else you have this truth exemplified in a manner some degrees less painful to your own feelings; seeing old Time, that busy artificer, performing on the countenance of an intimate friend. Curiously you watch him, as, with his graver's tool, he draws horizontal, parallel lines along the smooth brow; designs skilfully a simple yet ingenious pattern of crow's feet at the corner of each haggard eye, pares down the rounded contours, and cuts them into sharp points and angles, and paints out with his dull grays and drabs the rosy flush of colour from the once love-bright cheek. Ay, me! Ay, me! indeed. What so frail, so butterfly lived as beauty in the individual? Hardly are we consoled by the reflection that at least in the species it seems perennial. But though the visible presence of this fairest of earth's visitants - this living witness that Eden once existed - is so sadly short, yet in memory it out-lives all the other powers that sway our destinies. Great kingdoms grew into being in the old times, at least we suppose so, we having now nothing of them but their dark old tombs. Big men did big things, and might as well never have done them for all we know about them, seeing that they rot now in such unrescued, irrecoverable oblivion. Even the most learned of our pundits in the historical and antiquarian line have but the most shadowy impression of what brave deeds were done, of what wise thoughts were thought, of how men lived and loved, and believed and hoped in that dim far dawning. As for the bulk of us ignoramuses or ignorami (as I suppose would be the correct plural), it is a great chance if we know the names of the four great empires that people talk so much about nowadays.

But when shall we cease to hear the trailing garments of Helen the well-robed, the goddess of women, sweeping down the shadowy echoing corridors of Priam's cool, wide palace? And when, oh when, save at the hour when recollection's self perishes, shall we forget "the serpent of old Nile;" made up of delicious contradictions, enchanting termagant! the tempest of whose anger blew sweeter than the breath of the west wind come straight from a garden of roses; whose scolding angry words seemed more caressing, more utterly bewitching than other women's love-whispers! Frail, vain, variable, heartless coquette! who could yet love so exceeding well "her curled Antony," her mailed Homan darling, as to choose the aspick's cold kisses on her soft flesh, rather than existence without him - who could lay aside life, with so queenly rare a grace, as to make us "half in love with dreamful death!" still, yes still, though dead, you snare us "in your strong toil of grace." That was a lovely conception of the mightiest and sweetest of all singers that have sung for many a day, embodied in the "Dream of Fair Women." Those "far renowned brides of ancient song" were worthy denizens for the fragrant chambers of a great poet's soul. He who has been able to set before us -

"Idalian Aphrodite, beautiful,
Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Paphian wells,"

 who has called her back from her old Cyprian home, with her own rosy cloud of love and maddening witchery round her, taking the senses by storm, who can, even now, make men's veins throb and their pulses beat with ecstasy, leading them into the presence of her divine ambrosial loveliness, he, I say, is one of the few great artists - the one great artist indeed, in these barren days, that is equal to the task of limning those "imperial moulded forms" that haunt his dim wood. How great a treat, how rich a banquet for the half-starved fancy to wander with the great enchanter among the shadowy aisles, the faintly-seen archets of those great dew-drenched ancient trees, to see him conquer the unconquerable one, foil the prime victor over human kind, touching the dry dust, and making it reassume the forms of those "Daughters of the Gods," making us reach across the centuries, and awaking them out of their nameless graves, with the sleep of many ages still heavy on their long-closed eyelids, making us behold them, shining in the noonday rays of his strong imagination, more perfectly, flawlessly fair, more absolutely free from mortal stain or blemish, than when first they ravished the eyes of their demigod lovers! I could babble on, on this theme, for ever: it opens out such long lines of thought. I am not Tennyson, as I need hardly inform anyone who has got thus far. I am also pretty sure that I am not possessed of that greatest of gifts, a poetic soul, - in its creative power coming next (though at an immeasurable distance) to God Himself. But, for all that, I too have, this night, had a "Dream of Fair Women."

My fair women were not celebrated ones, though. The world never heard, never will hear of them. Indeed, there is nothing for it to hear. Their voices were too low and gentle to be audible above its dull roar. But none the less for that are they pleasant visitants. Nor are they only dream-faces bending over me, in their evanescent intangible bloom, as I lie on my bed, and, when morning dawns, leaving only a vague unreal impression of something far pleasanter than the work-a-day world of realities affords. No, they are real flesh-and-blood faces; the faces of the women who, at different times, in different relations of life, have influenced and moulded my destiny. Rather should I say that, in an inner chamber of my spirit, I have a secret picture-gallery. None enters there but myself; small beauty would a stranger see, perchance, in some of those woman portraits. Some of my pictures were painted many years ago; some have been slightly, poorly sketched, and their colours are getting wishy washy and blurred. Others glow with more vivid, liquid, melting hues, every time I look upon them. But the gem of the collection has been hung there but a short time. The paint is hardly dry yet. Often I stand before that girl image, and gaze and gaze till my eyes ache and burn, in the intensity of my longing that those lips should unclose but once again, for one little minute; should just say one word, whether cross or kind, or cruel or tender, would mate but small difference, so as it were conveyed by that obstinately silent voice....