by George Moore
“Bed-time,” Helen suggested, and they laughed and turned to the present that the young ladies had sent them.
“We must ask them to dinner. You’ll think them rather vulgar people, but they are important, and there is a whole tribe of Carvers — Benjamins, Phillips, Myers, and the rest, all of which will give me orders for portraits. There are thousands of pounds in this connection, and there are thousands of pounds, Helen, if you can persuade your father to overlook our Twickenham adventure.”
“But he need know nothing about it. We just married — that is all,” she answered, and went over to the escritoire and sat there writing letters until dinner-time. After dinner a telegram came from Carver saying that Lewis might expect him to-morrow at half-past ten, and that he would give sittings for his portrait all through August.
Lady Helen knew how to be gracious; and her presence in the studio flattered Carver, and when the Carvers came to see the portrait they were invited to dinner, and these hospitalities produced, as Lewis suspected they would, a new group of Jews and Jewesses anxious to have their portraits painted. And when Lewis’s success reached Lord Granderville’s ears, he said he would have preferred one of his own set for a son-in-law, but failing that, he accepted a man of talent; and as nothing would he gained by harshness, he decided that Lewis should paint the portrait that his Colonial admirers were anxious to present him with. Lady Granderville thought some little scandal might ensue if he were to choose another painter.
The fates seemed to be working for Lewis’s welfare. Lady Granderville’s admirers wished to present a portrait to her ladyship in token of the good work she had done during the five years she had lived amongst them, and Lady Granderville was overjoyed at presenting her daughter with another five hundred pounds. It never rains but it pours, and the Carver family proved such a great success in the Academy that Lewis had more work on his hands than he had time to execute. He made a great deal of money during these first years of married life, and he could have made a great deal more if he had consented to devote himself entirely to portrait painting, but he wished to become a member of the Academy, and his election would be advanced were he to exhibit a picture. No picture could he devised more likely to attract the attention of the whole town than the one he had begun in the Twickenham villa — the Bacchante leaning against the statue of Pan, gathering grapes over her head.
“But if it should become known that you sat for the picture?” Lewis asked.
“But what does it matter if it does become known? The news will only serve to make the picture more remarkable,” she replied; and having obtained in the last two years a greater mastery over his material than he had ever possessed before, he was able to finish the picture without difficulty, all of it but the head, for which he required some sittings, his wife’s head being in such keeping with the figure that it could not be changed. “If we could get a description of the picture into the newspaper before the exhibition,” he said; and Helen began a poem that evening, and Harding was invited to dinner to hear the poem at the end of the week. The verses were not without merit, and Harding had no difficulty in getting one of his newspapers to print them, and from that day he became a constant visitor at the Vale, revising Helen’s poetry and encouraging her to write more.
CHAP. XXXII.
“WE MUST SEE his ‘Bacchante ‘; I hear that—”
“My dear Henrietta, I’m afraid we cannot stay another minute. Remember we have friends coming to luncheon.”
“My dear, I didn’t know you had asked anybody to luncheon. You said nothing to me about it. Whom did you ask?...”
“He has painted Helen’s face on his ‘Bacchante’; a most — I may say a most impolite, a most ungentlemanly thing to do. Everybody is talking about it.”
“But Helen must have seen the picture before it went in, dear.”
“Very likely she did, but Helen’s notions of propriety and mine have never been the same. I think we had better be going.... I take it that there is nothing you particularly wish to see again?”
As the Grandervilles passed through the turnstile they were greeted by Lady Marion, who cried out to them that she was afraid she had forgotten her invitation card. “Would they call at Charles Street and ask for it? I’ve found it!” she cried.
“We’re so glad; we’re so glad,” Lord Granderville cried, as he hurried away, afraid lest she should ask if they had seen the “Bacchante.”
“There they go!” Lady Marion cried to Mr. Ripple, who accompanied her. “More shocked than I’ve ever seen them before. All their lives they have been looking for something to shock them. Well, they’ve found the real thing this time. Think of it! Painting his wife without a stitch of clothing on her, except a scarf falling about her thigh — only over one thigh, mind you, so I’m told. Helen always liked exhibiting herself. I remember her quarrelling with her dressmaker for not cutting her gowns low enough, and I dare say you remember how they always seemed on the point of escaping from the diamond star or arrow, and how frightened we used to be. I wonder if the Grandervilles have seen the picture? Perhaps that is why they were hurrying away. I must drop in about tea-time to hear what Henrietta has to say.”
“I’m afraid, Lady Marion, that you needn’t go to your sister to hear about this picture; everybody is talking about it,” the young man replied.
“Are they really?” she answered. “Let us hasten, then”; and very soon after they found themselves among a group of acquaintances engaged in discussing if Lewis had not flattered his wife’s figure — her arms he had certainly. “Helen never had good arms,” somebody avouched, “and her hands are large, but in the picture—”
“Her arms are but a small portion of the picture,” Lady Marion interjected; and criticism turned on Helen’s legs, and several ladies agreed among themselves that nobody had as beautiful feet.
“Helen’s feet,” said her aunt, “are the most beautiful — I’ve never seen such beautiful feet! The feet in the picture are certainly her feet.”
At that moment a broadly built, square-shouldered man, with visionary eyes, beckoned to Ripple, who, loath to lose a word of Lady Marion’s appreciation of her niece’s bodily perfections, obeyed Leek’s summons reluctantly; but he obeyed it, Leek being an editor of coming importance — one who had been summoned from the chaste North to purify the sensual South, and the news that Lewis Seymour had painted his “Bacchante” from his wife seemed to him to be the very opportunity he needed. “The right of the artist to paint the naked should stir the heart of Puritan London, which is not dead, but sleepeth,” he was muttering to himself when he caught sight of Ripple.
“I’m sorry to call you away from your friends,” Mr. Leek began.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ripple answered somewhat obsequiously; and the journalist asked him the name of the lady who seemed the principal of the group.
“Lady Marion — Lady Helen Seymour’s aunt,” Ripple answered. And Mr. Leek asked if she was not very angry at the scandal.
“Scandal?” repeated Ripple.
“You have heard, I suppose,” Leek continued, “that—”
“Ah, yes, of course!” Ripple interjected, anxious to return to his friends.
“It would be very interesting,” Leek said, “to have Lady Marion’s views. She has views, I suppose? She cannot be else than indignant.”
“I don’t think that Lady Marion is ever very indignant at anything,” Ripple replied. At which a gloom overspread the journalist’s face, and he began to speak of the profligacy of great cities, and to vent a theory that morality driven out of the city retires into the hills to hide itself among the peasantry, and then at last descends upon the city and destroys it.
Lady Marion had moved away with her friends into the next gallery, and Ripple, seeing them depart, yielded himself to Leek’s importunities.
Leek would like to walk round and see the pictures with him, and to hear what he had to say; but Ripple soon found that Leek’s notion of appreciating pictures was to
stand with his back to them and to moralise.
“The story that has reached me,” he began, “is that Lewis Seymour insisted that his wife should sit naked for him for this picture, and if this be true we have a very important matter to settle in the newspapers regarding marital rights. Has a husband a Tight to make his wife a gazing-stock, and to draw her and to paint her, and to exhibit her nakedness to the multitude?” He averred that all right-minded people would say that marriage did not confer any such right; and he was sure that there were many right-minded people who would regard such conduct as sufficient cause for a divorce. The courts would hold it to be cruelty to force a wife to stand naked and unashamed hour after hour.
“But, Mr. Leek, it may have been Lady Helen’s own wish to sit for this picture.”
Leek had considered this possibility; but he soon recovered himself, and answered that, if that were so, the moral degradation of London was even greater than he had supposed it to be; and, warming up to his subject, he declared that the exhibition of the “Bacchante” raised a much larger issue than that of a husband’s rights to obtain sittings from his wife in a state of nakedness. The point that he would like to see settled was the right of the artist to paint naked figures from naked human beings — a point that went to the very heart of social life. The County Council subventions schools of art, in which a naked man sits one week and a naked woman sits another week for classes composed of young men and young women. The money for the support of these schools came out of the rates, therefore the conscientious ratepayer was paying young girls to exhibit themselves naked to the inquiring eyes of art students of both sexes.
He was not at all certain that the ratepayer would not be justified in refusing to pay rates for such purposes on conscientious grounds; and he believed that an agitation could be set on foot to defend the conscientious ratepayer. He believed, too, that he would find a very large mass supporting him in this matter. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the Bishop of London would not be able to refuse to support him. He was not a friend of the Bishops; they were a pusillanimous lot, always with the majority. But he thought he could rouse them. And there were many men on the County Council who, when they got the matter well before them, would see that they were not justified in voting for young girls to degrade themselves.
“But would you banish young male models from the schools of art?”
“Not if females were excluded from the schools.”
“But the exclusion of the female will raise a very indignant protest.”
The remark caused some disquiet, and Leek thought for a moment before he answered that the indignant protest would have to be faced courageously. He was always on the side of the oppressed; and this much he was prepared to admit — that the naked male was not as flagrant an appeal to the female as the naked female was to the male.
“You may be right, Mr. Leek, in that opinion; but as you are not a woman you cannot speak authoritatively on the matter.”
“This, however, is certain,” Leek continued, “that if the opportunity be given to women to draw from a male or a female, you will find that they will choose the female.”
“Now there, Mr. Leek, I’m bound to say that I disagree with you, for if the model be an Italian youth you’ll find all the girls drawing in that class, and the girl model almost deserted by her sex.”
Ripple’s statement carried the discussion into all sorts of byways; and when it returned to the point from which it started, whether the State should pay money to support art schools in which young girls exhibited themselves naked, Leek said: “I put it to you this way, Ripple — we have been engaged in a crusade against the morality of the music-hall, and with the help of the clergy we have forced the proprietors to abolish promenades in which vicious women collect. Of what use will be the abolition of the promenades if models are paid by the County Council to sit naked at classes composed of both sexes?”
In arguments of this kind Scripture is always quoted, and Ripple reminded Leek that our Lord Jesus Christ did not encourage the Pharisees to stone the woman taken in adultery. He merely said: “Whosoever is without sin amongst you, let him cast the first stone.”
“And of what use would it be,” he asked Leek, “to drive the women out of the promenades into the streets unless they were driven out of the streets into the river? And to do this,” he urged, “would be most unchristian — so unchristian that he doubted very much if even a Bishop could agree that the crusade against vice should be pressed as far as the river’s bank. You see,” he went on, “we live in an imperfect world, Mr. Leek; one that even journalism has not succeeded in purifying as yet, and it is doubtful if it ever will.” At which remark Leek laughed. He was neither stupid nor mercenary, and being anxious to hear every side of the question, he listened to Ripple, who asked him if he were quite sure that the Bishops would agree with him in this — that nakedness is in itself sinful.
“Nakedness may not be sinful in itself,” Leek replied, “but it leads to sin.” Whereupon Ripple, who by this time had given up all hopes of rejoining Lady Marion, answered that the naked races are the most moral. He instanced the Zulus, and as Leek had no facts wherewith to confute Ripple, he replied that the morality of the unclothed was merely that of animals. A good thing in its way, but uninteresting compared with the higher morality which implied a knowledge of sin. “Man must be aware of sin, Mr. Ripple, and resist it, else there can be no merit.” A dogma that put the question into Ripple’s mouth: “Am I to understand, then, that man should seek out temptation so that he may resist it? A dangerous practice, Mr. Leek, and one that was condemned by the Church, so productive of scandals were these attestations in those early times.”
Mr. Leek answered with a quotation from Scripture: “That likewise joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety-and-nine just persons, which need no repentance.”
“You would not go so far as to say that repentance is necessary to salvation?”
“I would, indeed,” Leek replied.
“But the races that have no knowledge of sin?” Ripple interposed.
“I deny, and emphatically, that races exist without knowledge of sin.”
“Well, of course, if you are certain,” Ripple answered; and he was preparing to turn away, regardless of the fate of the contribution he had posted that morning, when Harding clapped him on the shoulder, and, being anxious to parade his friendship with the great critic, Ripple said, as soon as he recovered himself: “Mr. Harding, let me introduce you to London’s new editor.”
“I’m very glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Harding”; and Leek’s voice dropped into more conciliatory tones, for he was anxious to hear what Harding would have to say on the question he was about to raise in his paper — the moral effect of the naked female in the Royal Academy.
“We were talking of the influence of the naked, or the nude, as it is usually termed. My contributor — Mr.
Ripple — and myself are not altogether in agreement as to which word should be used.”
Harding interposed that whenever we wish to be overnice or snobbish we use words without any specific meaning. “It is more polite to call a shop an establishment than to call it merely a shop. All violent imagery, Mr. Leek, is reprehensible.” And Harding told a story of an Irish sergeant who, whilst giving his evidence in a divorce suit, described the guilty pair as being “as naked as two worrums,” but the newspapers, thinking the image too vivid, reported him as saying “as naked as two snakes.”
“Snakes are not naked, Mr. Leek, as you know.”
“Bad editing,” Leek replied. “I should have allowed the sergeant’s words to stand. Of course, all you say about the use of words is extremely interesting, Mr. Harding, but for the moment I’d like to talk to you about the relation of art to morals, if you don’t mind.”
“And of morals to art,” Harding said—” which begat which, and on which side the greatest debt lies.”
“We were asking — myself
and Mr. Ripple — before you arrived, if art did not owe to morality more than morality did to art.”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Leek. You were saying,” Ripple interrupted, “that without consciousness of sin there could be no human morality.”
“Without consciousness of sin there could be no clerical morality,” Harding answered; and then, as if he felt the discussion was falling into the pure abstract, and as if anxious to lead it back to the Academy, to the prevalence of the naked female, he asked Leek if he were prepared to submit the annual exhibition to a censorship, or, in other words, to a high-class committee of gentlemen whose business it would be to guide the public taste.
“A censorship is a difficult matter; liberal opinion is against censorship, but I should like to get an answer to this question from you. Do you think that if the naked be harmful, it should be prohibited?”
“If the naked be harmful it certainly should be prohibited, life being more important than art.”
“I’m glad to hear you admit so much, Mr. Harding, and you will not mind my mentioning in my newspaper that that is your opinion; if the naked be harmful, it should be suppressed, life being more important than art.”
“If there were no publication there would be few, if any, opinions, just as there would be no immorality if we all went naked....”
“But is that so?” Leek answered. “Mr. Ripple, my contributor, seems to think with you that we should he more moral if we didn’t wear clothes. But it seems to me that in England we must be as moral as petticoats allow us to be. We cannot compel our women to go naked, so that our minds may be free from sinful thoughts; and as clothes are a necessary condition of our existence, clothes should be observed in our pictures as in our daily life, surely. You will admit that, Mr. Harding. Of course, there is Greek example, and talking of Greece reminds me that, despite their lack of clothing, the Greeks were not an entirely moral race.” Whereupon Harding, who feared that Leek was about to speak of Alcibiades’s shocking proposals to Socrates, begged him to remember that complete nakedness was necessary to insure complete morality. And to make his views on this subject clear to Leek, he told a story of four sisters, natives of Patagonia, who had discovered a torn glove on the seashore, and deeming it to be an article of apparel, disputed it so eagerly that the parents of the girls advised that each should share a finger. Lots were drawn for the different fingers (there was no thumb). The first, second and third fell to the younger sisters, the little finger went to the eldest sister, who wore her prize humbly till it was noticed that her finger alone was covered perfectly, her sisters’ skins being visible through rents and tears. Thereupon her little finger became the highest curiosity among the village swains. For some reason, difficult to determine, so imperfect is our psychological sense, the eldest sister, though the plainest, was henceforth preferred to all the others, and a great store of mealies and the finest hut in the village were proposed to her. But she would uncover her little finger to no one, till at last she was led deep into the forest, far from all curious eyes, where, after protracted pleadings, she revealed her little finger naked to the swain’s adoring eyes: and at the word naked Ripple interjected and went off into a giggling fit.
