“You are not getting tired?”
“Oh, no!”
“You are not bored?”
“Oh, mamma!”
“Are they beautiful?”
“I don’t know.”
When one is a child one doesn’t know what is beautiful. The beautiful thing is to have the heart satisfied. What a sudden uplift my entire æsthetic nature received from them! The unframed outlines of nature had never impressed me; now that, copied, transferred to a square of paper, I could look at them, I saw them, not only on the motionless page, but everywhere, and all alive. The house with its great stones, the walled-in garden—I had often used to touch them, understand them, possess them;—and besides, they belonged to me. But beyond our house the universe began, and its limitlessness had repelled me, so that I could never think of it as having definite outlines. And here those outlines were, before my eyes; through the open Bible I discovered them.
At thirty years’ distance I find again in my memory, with no need of verification, the pictures of Gustave Doré. The pages turn of their own accord and my beloved phantoms reappear. Here are those visions of dread, Leviathan upheaving the sea, the destroying Angel exterminating Sennacherib’s army, the long train of Nicannor’s elephants between which Judas Maccabeus has to pass, and Death in the Apocalypse on his pale horse. They were not my favourites, and in the evening I used even to avoid them. My favourites were those quiet, reposeful, almost shadowy Oriental landscapes, where the summer sunlight seemed to draw up mists, where strange plants grew most unlike our oaks and chestnuts, where in the background were shadows of oxen and camels, far away like boats upon the lake in time of fog.
The birth of Eve seemed lovely to me. While Adam sleeps among the flowers of Eden, she uprises erect and unclothed, with floating hair. One of her knees—look at it, I am sure of it!—slightly bent, is caressed by the sunlight. Through her, by this light upon her knee, I felt something of the pure perfection of nudity long before I even dreamed of its desire. Abraham leads his flocks to the land of Canaan, and the backs of the huddled sheep undulate like the waves that I had seen from the lake shore. The cradle of Moses floats upon the Nile; Pharaoh’s daughter has come out from the palace that stands basking in the sun; she draws near the river; one of her waiting women takes up the little bark. Rebecca, in a long white veil, rests her pitcher upon the margin of the well and talks with Eliezer, a venerable old man; but I don’t distinguish her from the Samaritan woman who takes the same position. Ruth, kneeling, gleans the wheat ears. The great cedars of Lebanon, cut down, lie upon the earth which their shadow overspreads; they are waiting to be used in building the temple in Jerusalem. The angel of the Annunciation hovers in the air, like a falling leaf upheld by the wind. Jesus in the house of Lazarus is sitting on the window ledge, the moonlight stealing through the palm trees. Mary crouching at his feet is drinking in his words, Martha, standing, is busy with household cares. Pictures through which peace flows like a limpid stream, and which are but the transposition of every-day scenes, almost like those which I might have seen at our house and in the country,—pictures of obscure lives, through which God passes.
One day when I declined to be present at the return of the prodigal son to the paternal home, my mother, who loved that parable, asked the reason of this disdain.