born of murmuring sound,
Did pass into his face.’
Blame him not. There are more things in a man’s heart than ever get in through his thoughts.
On a sudden, a soft voice behind him startled him.
‘Can a poor cockney artist venture himself along this timber without falling in?’
Lancelot turned.
‘Come out to me, and if you stumble, the naiads will rise out of their depths, and “hold up their pearled wrists” to save their favourite.’
The artist walked timidly out along the beams, and sat down beside Lancelot, who shook him warmly by the hand.
‘Welcome, Claude Mellot, and all lovely enthusiasms and symbolisms! Expound to me, now, the meaning of that water-lily leaf and its grand simple curve, as it lies sleeping there in the back eddy.’
‘Oh, I am too amused to philosophise. The fair Argemone has just been treating me to her three hundred and sixty-fifth philippic against my unoffending beard.’
‘Why, what fault can she find with such a graceful and natural ornament?’
‘Just this, my dear fellow, that it is natural. As it is, she considers me only “intelligent-looking.” If the beard were away, my face, she says, would be “so refined!” And, I suppose, if I was just a little more effeminate and pale, with a nice retreating under-jaw and a drooping lip, and a meek, peaking simper, like your starved Romish saints, I should be “so spiritual!” And if, again, to complete the climax, I did but shave my head like a Chinese, I should be a model for St. Francis himself!’
‘But really, after all, why make yourself so singular by this said beard?’
‘I wear it for a testimony and a sign that a man has no right to be ashamed of the mark of manhood. Oh, that one or two of your Protestant clergymen, who ought to be perfect ideal men, would have the courage to get up into the pulpit in a long beard, and testify that the very essential idea of Protestantism is the dignity and divinity of man as God made him! Our forefathers were not ashamed of their beards; but now even the soldier is only allowed to keep his moustache, while our quill-driving masses shave themselves as close as they can; and in proportion to a man’s piety he wears less hair, from the young curate who shaves off his whiskers, to the Popish priest who shaves his crown!’
‘What do you say, then, to cutting off nuns’ hair?’
‘I say, that extremes meet, and prudish Manichæism always ends in sheer indecency. Those Papists have forgotten what woman was made for, and therefore, they have forgotten that a woman’s hair is her glory, for it was given to her for a covering: as says your friend, Paul the Hebrew, who, by the bye, had as fine theories of art as he had of society, if he had only lived fifteen hundred years later, and had a chance of working them out.’
‘How remarkably orthodox you are!’ said Lancelot, smiling.
‘How do you know that I am not? You never heard me deny the old creed. But what if an artist ought to be of all creeds at once? My business is to represent the beautiful, and therefore to accept it wherever I find it. Yours is to be a philosopher, and find the true.’
‘But the beautiful must be truly beautiful to be worth anything; and so you, too, must search for the true.’
‘Yes; truth of form, colour, chiaroscuro. They are worthy to occupy me a life; for they are eternal—or at least that which they express: and if I am to get at the symbolised unseen, it must be through the beauty of the symbolising phenomenon. If I, who live by art, for art, in art, or you either, who seem as much a born artist as myself, am to have a religion, it must be a worship of the fountain of art—of the
“Spirit of beauty, who doth consecrate
With his own hues whate’er he shines upon.”’
‘As poor Shelley has it; and much peace of mind it gave him!’ answered Lancelot. ‘I have grown sick lately of such dreary tinsel abstractions. When you look through the glitter of the words, your “spirit of beauty” simply means certain shapes and colours which please you in beautiful things and in beautiful people.’
‘Vile nominalist! renegade from the ideal and all its glories!’ said Claude, laughing.
‘I don’t care sixpence now for the ideal! I want not beauty, but some beautiful thing—a woman perhaps,’ and he sighed. ‘But at least a person—a living, loving person—all lovely itself, and giving loveliness to all things! If I must have an ideal, let it be, for mercy’s sake, a realised one.’
Claude opened his sketch-book.
‘We shall get swamped in these metaphysical oceans, my dear dreamer. But lo, here come a couple, as near ideals as any in these degenerate days—the two poles of beauty: the milieu of which would be Venus with us Pagans, or the Virgin Mary with the Catholics. Look at them! Honoria the dark—symbolic of passionate depth; Argemone the fair, type of intellectual light! Oh, that I were a Zeuxis to unite them instead of having to paint them in two separate pictures, and split perfection in half, as everything is split in this piecemeal world!’
‘You will have the honour of a sitting this afternoon, I suppose, from both beauties?’
‘I hope so, for my own sake. There is no path left to immortality, or bread either, now for us poor artists but portrait-painting.’
‘I envy you your path, when it leads through such Elysiums,’ said Lancelot.
‘Come here, gentlemen both!’ cried Argemone from the bridge.
‘Fairly caught!’ grumbled Lancelot. ‘You must go, at least; my lameness will excuse me, I hope.’
The two ladies were accompanied by Bracebridge, a gazelle which he had given Argemone, and a certain miserable cur of Honoria’s adopting, who plays an important part in this story, and, therefore, deserves a little notice. Honoria had rescued him from a watery death in the village pond, by means of the colonel, who had revenged himself for a pair of wet feet by utterly corrupting the dog’s morals, and teaching him every week to answer to some fresh scandalous name.
But Lancelot was not to escape. Instead of moving on, as he had hoped, the party stood looking over the bridge, and talking—he took for granted, poor thin-skinned fellow—of him. And for once his suspicions were right; for he overheard Argemone say—
‘I wonder how Mr. Smith can be so rude as to sit there in my presence over his stupid perch! Smoking those horrid cigars, too! How selfish those field-sports do make men!’
‘Thank you!’ said the colonel, with a low bow. Lancelot rose.
‘If a country girl, now, had spoken in that tone,’ said he to himself, ‘it would have been called at least “saucy”—but Mammon’s elect ones may do anything. Well—here I come, limping to my new tyrant’s feet, like Goethe’s bear to Lili’s.’
She drew him away, as women only know how, from the rest of the party, who were chatting and laughing with Claude. She had shown off her fancied indifference to Lancelot before them, and now began in a softer voice—
‘Why will you be so shy and lonely, Mr. Smith?’
‘Because I am not fit for your society.’
‘Who tells you so? Why will you not become so?’
Lancelot hung down his head.
‘As long as fish and game are your only society, you will become more and more morne and self-absorbed.’
‘Really fish were the last things of which I was thinking when you came. My whole heart was filled with the beauty of nature, and nothing else.’
There was an opening for one of Argemone’s preconcerted orations.
‘Had you no better occupation,’ she said gently, ‘than nature, the first day of returning to the