“Your brush and palette will never yield you any permanent happiness, nor promote a spirit of contentment, until you select a different class of subjects. Your themes are all too sombre, too dismal, and the sole motif that runs through your music and painting seems to be in memoriam. Open the windows of your gloomy soul, and let God’s sunshine stream into its cold recesses, and warm and gild and gladden it. Throw aside your morbid proclivities for the melancholy and abnormal, and paint peaceful genre pictures,—a group of sunburnt, laughing harvesters, or merry children, or tulip-beds with butterflies swinging over them. You need more warmth in your heart, and more light in your pictures.”

“Eminently correct,—most incontestably true; but how do you propose to remedy the imperfect chiaro-oscuro of my character? Show me the market where that light of peace and joy is bartered, and I will constitute you my broker, with unlimited orders. No, no. I see the fact as plainly as you do, but I know better than you how irremediable it is. My soul is a doleful morgue, and my pictures are dim photographs of its corpse-tenants. Shut in forever from the sunshine, I dip my brush in the shadows that surround me, for, like Empedocles,—

... ‘I alone Am dead to life and joy; therefore I read
In all things my own deadness.’”

“If you would free yourself from the coils of an intense and selfish egoism that fetter you to the petty cares and trials of your individual existence,—if you would endeavor to forget for a season the woes of Mrs. Gerome, and expend a little more sympathy on the sorrows of others,—if you would resolve to lose sight of the caprices that render you so unpopular, and make some human being happy by your aid and kind words,—in fine, if, instead of selecting as your model some cynical, half-insane woman like Lady Hester Stanhope, you chose for imitation the example of noble Christian usefulness 350 and self-abnegation, analogous to that of Florence Nightingale, or Mrs. Fry, you would soon find that your conscience—”

“Enough! You weary me. Dr. Grey, I thoroughly understand your motives, and honor their purity, but I beg that you will give yourself no further anxiety on my account. You cannot, from your religious standpoint, avoid regarding me as worse than a heathen, and have constituted yourself a missionary to reclaim and consecrate me. I am not quite a cannibal, ready to devour you, by way of recompense for your charitable efforts in my behalf, but I must assure you your interest and sympathy are sadly wasted. Do you remember that celebrated ‘vase of Soissons,’ which was plundered by rude soldiery in Rheims, and which Clovis so eagerly coveted at the distribution of the spoils? A soldier broke it before the king’s hungry eyes, and forced him to take the worthless mocking fragments. Even so flint-faced fate shattered my happiness, and tauntingly offers me the ruins; but I will none of it!”

“Trust God’s overruling mercy, and those fragments, fused in the furnace of affliction, may be remoulded and restored to you in pristine perfection.”

“Impossible! Moreover, I trust nothing but the brevity of human life, which one day cannot fail to release me from an existence that has proved an almost intolerable burden. You know Vogt says, ‘The natural laws are rude, unbending powers,’ and I comfort myself by hoping that they can neither be bribed nor browbeaten out of the discharge of their duty, which points to death as ‘the surest calculation that can be made,—as the unavoidable keystone of every individual life.’ A grim consolation, you think? True; but all I shall ever receive. Dr. Grey, in your estimation I am sinfully inert and self-indulgent; and you conscientiously commend my idle hands to the benevolent work of knitting socks for indigent ditchers, and making jackets for pauper children. Now, although it is considered neither orthodox nor modest to furnish left-hand with a trumpet for sounding the praises of almsgiving right-hand, still I must be allowed to assert 351 that I appropriate an ample share of my fortune for charitable purposes. Perhaps you will tell me that I do not give in a proper spirit of loving sympathy,—that I hurl my donations at my conscience, as ‘a sop to Cerberus.’ I have never injured any one, and if I have no tender love in my heart to expend on others, it is the fault of that world which taught me how hollow and deceitful it is. God knows I have never intentionally wounded any living thing; and if negatively good, at least my career has no stain of positive evil upon it. I am one of those concerning whom Richter said, ‘There are souls for whom life has no summer. These should enjoy the advantages of the inhabitants of Spitzbergen, where, through the winter’s day, the stars shine clear as through the winter’s night.’ I have neither summer nor polar stars, but I wait for that long night wherein I shall sleep peacefully.”

“Mrs. Gerome, defiant pride bars your heart from the white-handed peace that even now seeks entrance. Some great sorrow or sin has darkened your past, and, instead of ejecting its memory, you hug it to your soul; you make it a mental Juggernaut, crushing the hopes and aims that might otherwise brighten the path along which you drag this murderous idol. Cast it away forever, and let Peace and Hope clasp hands over its empty throne.”

From that peculiar far-off expression of the human eye that generally indicates abstraction of mind, he feared that she had not heard his earnest appeal; but after some seconds, she smiled drearily, and repeated with singular and touching pathos, lines which proved that his words were not lost upon her,—

“‘Ah, could the memory cast her spots, as do
The snake’s brood theirs in spring! and be once more
Wholly renewed, to dwell in the time that’s new,—
With no reiterance of those pangs of yore.
Peace, peace! Ah, forgotten things
Stumble back strangely! and the ghost of June
Stands by December’s fire, cold, cold! and puts
The last spark out.’”