by George Moore
“But Polly,” Helen said, “unlike you, loves me for myself. I’m as much to Polly dressed, as I am undressed.”
“And is it not the same with me?” Lewis asked. Helen was not sure.
“If I weren’t of an appearance that pleased you—”
“But it is your appearance that attracted the bird. Polly can know nothing of your intellectual or moral qualities.”
“It is just because Polly knows nothing of my intellectual and moral qualities that her love is deeper than any human love can be. All that Polly knows of me is the elemental substance — that which a musician expresses, if he have genius.”
“Polly,” he objected, “looks to you for food.”
“You heard Kate say that Polly will take food only from those she loves; even the tempting spoonful of cocoa she’ll upset if the hand that presents it be not agreeable to her.”
“But how quickly Polly changes her affection; her mistress is already forgotten.”
“It would seem to me,” Helen answered, “that is another reason for my belief in the fundamental nature of an animal’s love. Polly lives in the present, free from recollection, and undisturbed with hope of a future. The actual moment is the only moment. Her love is undivided, but yours—”
“And yours? Is it altogether divorced from memory and imaginations that outstrip reality?” he interjected.
“Perhaps I should have said man’s,” she replied. “We are considering love in the abstract. Let us detach ourselves from our circumstances, and see ourselves a little as God sees us.”
“How does God see us? “ he asked.
“He would begin by recognising the fact that Polly does not see in me the making of a picture.”
“Therefore Polly does not appreciate you as I do,” he replied. “She doesn’t discriminate. She merely loves. So in your view, then, the artist is the most imperfect of all lovers?”
“Necessarily,” she said, “for he sees beyond the woman. Perhaps the perfect lover will never be found in reasonable man. Now I come to think of it, there would be a better chance of finding him in the unreasonable”; and laughing at her own thoughts, she began to tell of a friend of hers, a disillusioned woman who had fled from London to a lonely country-house, stored with books, music, pictures, with all things that appertain to art, and how while gazing on some marble, or twanging an old-time melody on the cithern, she was startled from her sad reverie by a man crashing through the sky-light of her studio. As she was about to ring for help, the sudden intruder rose to his feet, and begged of her not to summon her servants. He was not hurt. “But the shock?” she said. “A mere nothing,” he replied. “I’m used to worse shocks than the last and, sitting by her side, he told her how he had determined to discover the one woman who could give him perfect love, and had sought her all over the world, through the East and in deepest Africa. He had even ventured as far as the North and South Poles in search of the one human soul and body decreed to him from all eternity. “Without finding her?” she said. “Without finding her,” he answered, and when they looked into each other’s eyes it seemed to them that the great lovers of all time had met at last. And so that he might appreciate her as she appreciated him, she poured into his ears a moving account of her flight from London, and how she had hoped to obtain forgetfulness in art of one who had not proved as perfect in love as he had once seemed to be. No more words were spoken. Words were lost in the conviction that each had discovered Elysium in the other, and for a week each lived absorbed in the other till keepers from a neighbourhood lunatic asylum arrived with handcuffs. “A dangerous madman,’” they told the lady, and congratulated her on her escape, as they got their prisoner into the carriage.
“A very unfeeling story,” Lewis exclaimed, “one strangely unsuitable for a honeymoon,” he muttered, and his thoughts went back to Lucy, to her sweet kindly nature, and he remembered with a pang that he abandoned her for one who, though she had lain in his arms all night, seemed further from him than any other woman he had ever known. Maybe that was why he took her in his arms again and kissed her passionately.
“Helen, darling, why did you tell me that story? Am I a madman?”
“My dear Lewis, you take things so seriously; all great passions are allied to madness. You’re a madman in your art and in your love and not knowing what to make of her, he began thinking of his art.
But she knew how to uncreate the mood that she had created in him, and the suggestion that they might sit together on a bench melted it nearly away; Lucy was again forgotten in the course of the conversation that ensued regarding the drawing he had begun, and in the questions that she adroitly put to him, whether her figure would be of use to him; whether he could paint from her better than from any other model he had seen, even the French models.
“But no figure that I have ever seen is as perfect as yours.”
“But there are imperfections?” she said. “Am I not too thin in the arms?” and he answered that there were certain thinnesses in the shoulder-blades, but if these were filled in she would lose a great deal in character, though she might gain a little in beauty. “Your shoulders are beautifully shaped, as beautiful as any, and your breasts are small.”
“Too small?”
“Breasts are never too small. Your breasts are good,” he said.
“But you have seen better?” she answered.
“It would not be true to say that I have seen better. I may have seen breasts as shapely, but in an artist’s eyes the gift of beautiful breasts is not the supreme gift. Beautiful breasts are necessary; but it is not the beauty of breasts that compels my wonder, but the belly when it is beautiful, the low vault rising imperceptibly and in such exact architecture that I think of Euclid. Either one is crazed with the beauty of the human body or one has no eyes for it, as some have no ears for music; but if one sees it, what enchantment one gets from observing it, and of all in a woman like you. Were it my fate to see you borne away by angels, the spring of your hips would be before me always, and the smooth thighs that support the body, the small knees of such simple form—”
“Why are my knees simple?” she asked.
“Because,” he answered, “they are free from unnecessary detail. In you there are no broken lines. The line undulates from the hip to the ankle, simple in its variety. Your feet are miracles; long and narrow, the second toe longer than the big toe, as it always is in statues, but never in common nature. Your head is in keeping with your figure. A small rounded head crowned with gold. There is a Greek marble like you by Lysippus, I think, one of the late Greek sculptors before art fell into decadence. His Venus had no more hips than you. A Venus of pleasure rather than of maternity. It was her belly that set me thinking of yours. The same rhythms, the same proportions, the same navel, a gem carved inward with cunning hand, and finely set.”
“I’ve never thought much about my belly.”
“That was on account of the word!” he interjected. “But when I look over my shoulder,” she continued, “my back seems shapely enough.”
“Lysippus must have foreseen your back,” he said. “My back, perhaps; but my arms and shoulders are scraggy, aren’t they?”
“Not scraggy, but delicate in their thinness, which is quite different.” And he swore to her that he would not have her arms otherwise than as they were; nor her hands, though her hands were not as distinguished as her feet; still, there were beautiful lines in them.
“It is pleasant,” she said, “to hear how others see us, but in a quiet alley like this by the river-side one should be thinking of the round spots of light on the pathway and the twittering of the birds in the leaves rather than of bellies. Listen! That bird has a dear little song. Do you know what bird it is?”
Lewis thought it was a willow wren, and Helen reproved the answer, which she said was casual. A man with so keen an interest in anatomical subjects could only be faintly interested in bird-life. “You see willows, and you hear a bird, and have read of willow wrens, but you can’
t tell me if the bird has a long or a short tail. You are thinking of — Modesty forbids me to say of what you are thinking.”
“All that I told you,” he said, “of your figure was the artist’s appreciation of it, but had I known that you desired to hear the lover’s, I should have gratified you, imitating a lunatic, your ideal lover.”
She had to pacify him.
“You are curious to know of what I was thinking when you asked the name of the bird; I will tell you. I was thinking of the quiet, moist atmosphere of this river-side lawn, and of a picture of you emerging from the screening willows, a bather, one foot on the low bank, supporting herself, one hand on a willow branch.”
“The light changes in the open air,” she said, and he answered that it did, except on grey days. But the artist’s difficulties were not limited to a changing light. To render the woman attractive it would be necessary that she should be well within the picture. “There must be atmosphere between her and the spectator,” he said, “and to draw a naked woman is difficult, but to draw her in the atmosphere is ten times more difficult.”
“How interesting art is when one comes to understand the difficulties with which the artist has to contend,” Lady Helen said; and during luncheon Lewis began to talk more freely of his art, saying that modern art was more personal than ancient — more journalistic. The individual had no thought for himself in ancient Egypt; he was only aware of himself as part of a community, and figs were probably sold in Memphis to a ritual. Even the Greek artists sought the type much more than the individual, and the secularisation of life and art have continued till both life and art have become incoherent zigzags, observing no order, obedient to no rule.
Helen had never heard anyone æstheticise before, and she at once became a listener whose intentness flattered Lewis and beguiled him onward. That the Renaissance owed a great deal to antiquity is one of the platitudes of the critics, but Lewis did not know that any of the critics had remarked that among the thousands of naked women that have been painted in modern times it would be difficult to discover six in which the artist had tried to do more than to paint the individual woman before his eyes.
“It is, indeed,” he said, “a shameful admission that from the fifteenth century onwards, down to the end of the nineteenth, we cannot discover six figures, six pictures or statues, that tell us that the human being is the most beautiful thing in Nature. If men continue to paint naked women it is for the sake of their sex, not for the sake of their beauty. Men, being merely men, are never naked except in sculpture. Ingres and David,” he said, “were the last whose aim seems to have been to represent the archetype, and as soon as Napoleon’s empire passed away painters turned their eyes from antiquity, falling back into individualism of the Renaissance. For why? Because men were no longer prone to see men and women in all their attributes of perfections, as a point in Nature around which all else revolves. Or it may be,” he said, “that Nature no longer produces the archetypal woman. Once I would have accepted this explanation of the great change, but last night has convinced me that Nature is the same as she always was, producing great quantities of common stock and occasionally a miracle, so that we may carry our heads high.” As soon as Helen had divested herself of her chemise, he had seen in her Lysippus’s Venus, only more beautiful. “In some respects more beautiful in the flesh than in the marble,” he added; and he began to tell Helen that she was in his eyes a resurrection of ancient beauty. Breaking off suddenly, he said: “Perhaps you have found the realisation of your story in me. I am mad in front of a well-proportioned rhythmical belly, and am not ashamed of my madness.”
Her eyes were filled with wonder, for she had not heard these things before, and possessed by a great curiosity to understand, she said: “But, Lewis, why do you say that from the fifteenth century onwards there are not six women in art that represent female beauty?”
“I said, Helen, that there are not six in which the artist attempted to tell more than he saw in the individual, and I doubt if there be six. The first Venus is Botticelli’s, but she stands on a shell, if I remember rightly. There may be some art-books here that will help us.” And they admired the handsomely bound books on the different tables. “Mrs. Cartwright seems to be a woman of taste and culture,” Lewis said; “and I suppose Kate can give us the keys of these bookcases.”
“Here is a Life of Botticelli, and his works,” Helen said. “And here are the works of Titian and Veronese and of Tintoretto. We have everything we require for the prosecution of our inquiry. Botticelli, you said, was the first to paint Venus?”
“Yes, he goes back to the fifteenth century, to the end of the century. There was very little painting before the end of the fifteenth century, and he abandoned painting, I believe, and became very pious.”
“Was not everybody pious in those days?”
“But, my dear Helen, the Renaissance was a revival of Paganism,” Lewis said; “and here is the Venus we are seeking, on page 124”; and turning the pages over he came upon the “Birth of Venus.”
“‘The Birth of Art,’ it might be called”; and they sat admiring the figure standing timidly on the shell, that kind and beneficent zephyrs are blowing onwards: “rising,” Lewis said, “out of the gulf of the Middle Ages. The first blossom of the Renaissance comes to us hiding her sex with a tress of hair. Not knowing how she will be received, she comes timidly. She had heard of the monk, Savonarola, the one that good Pope Alexander VI. caused to be put to death along with his company, three others of the same kidney. She doesn’t know the treatment that may be meted out to her. The monk may be even now knotting the whip, a great thick whip, to strike her across those dear little buttocks. A detestable man was Savonarola, darling; he wanted to revive the Middle Ages — the ages of faith, but the good Pope burnt him.”
Helen thought that she had never heard anyone speak more beautifully than Lewis, and she took pleasure in the timid Venus on her voyage.
“Whether the idea was present in the painter’s mind we do not know, but, consciously or unconsciously, he painted her afraid.”
“Could it have been,” she asked, “that Botticelli saw that his Venus was the first?”
“The Renaissance was the return of life to the world,” Lewis answered. “Here we have his ‘Springtide’ “; and Lewis pointed out to Helen three women, “their hands raised and their fingers interlocked, pacing to a rhythm, while behind them in the background is the Spring herself, watchful, benign, and sad—”
“Why sad?” Helen asked.
And Lewis answered: “She is quick with child, and whosoever is quick is sad; there is something of you, Helen, in that mad figure in the spotted dress whom the faun would embrace.”
“Go on talking, Lewis; I like to hear you”; and, feeling as if he were speaking out of an inspiration, he began to tell how life had begun to return to the world in the fifteenth century, and how Botticelli was the first harbinger of the spring, saying that, just as the birds know by instinct when the rain is about to fall, and when the time has come to leave their summer haunts, Botticelli seemed to have received premonitions of the spring that was about to break upon the world. Be this as it may, he could not keep the spring out of his work even when painting Madonnas — women with a look of surprise in their eyes, we know not whether to call it gladness or sorrow, sorrow rather than gladness, for they are not sure that they have not come before their time. “It is a wonderful thought to ponder,” Lewis said, “whether Botticelli was conscious of the spring that was breaking, or if he only knew it instinctively,” and said he would like to believe that Botticelli was aware of the extraordinary circumstance of the world in which he lived; but he admitted that a contemporary never knows if he be living in a great or a humble period. So it must have been instinct as vague and as intense as that which animates birds and trees that caused Botticelli to put that strange look of surprise upon his Madonnas, and to paint St. John and the Holy Babe from village boys without alteration, and to leave these suddenly to pa
int the springtide in an April wood, choosing for his first group three women with linked hands raised in a mystic dance, their faces telling us of the solemn rhythm that their feet are bent on following. As a contrast to these he placed a girl in a spotted dress, who might well be a Madonna in another picture, and we wonder whether she is glad or sorry, whether she desires the satyr who, with outstretched hands, would seize her for his pleasure. It is not even certain that she is aware of his presence. In the picture she walks forward, her eyes wide open, like a somnambulist. What mission Botticelli had assigned to her Lewis could not remember. “As likely as not,” he said, “she scatters flowers. No one remembers the whole of a picture, however much he admires it; and to no one has this picture ever meant as much as it has meant to me.” And then feeling that he was saying things worth saying, so strangely intimate were they to him, he continued to talk for a long while, telling many other things, saying that no story or order of ideas or action connects the figures in this picture, every one seeming to live and to act without knowledge of the next one. And to make plain his meaning, he spoke of the young man on the left gathering grapes, without regard to the pagan rout of nymphs and satyrs pouring into the quiet wood. Yet the picture, he affirmed, did not seem to him to lack synthesis. It all rose, he said, out of a single thought, and the mind was not distracted by conflicting things; yet it would be difficult to say how this unity had been obtained: whether it had been gotten by the all-pervading languor or by the dominating figure of Spring herself, heavy with child, at the edge of the filmy wood — a strange and mournful figure, who overlooks the glad pageant apparently without seeing it, yet conscious of it. All we can say is that the gesture of one hand seems to imply something less than a benediction — a sort of acquiescence. “Let it be so,” the hand says.
