Henry Northcote

by J. C. Snaith

“Can this be he who preached the Sermon upon the Mount? Can this be he who said to the woman taken in adultery, ‘Daughter, go thy ways, and sin no more’?”

Already the roughness of the advocate was melted into blood and tears. His callous rage had yielded before the figure of the Magdalene. This nondescript animal he had picked out of a sewer had proved to be a woman who had bled for abasement, and who strove for reinstatement by bleeding for it again.

“I have a curiosity about your history,” said Northcote, with a gaze that devoured her. “You see you are pictured in my imagination as the denizen of a slum.”

“I entered upon life,” said the woman, yielding to the domination of his eyes, “as the eldest daughter of an artist whose existence was a misery. He was a painter of masterpieces that no one would buy. He had not been in his grave a year when they began to realize sums that during his life would have appeared to him as fabulous. His two girls, who comprised his family, never got the benefit of the recognition that had been denied to their maker; but the dealers in pictures, who had begrudged him so much as oils and canvas, grew rich by trading upon a great name.

“My childhood was bitter, cruel, and demoralizing. Art for the sake of art was the doctrine of my poor father, and in pursuing it he took to drink. That honest and virtuous world which I have never been allowed to enter, viewed him afar off as an outcast, as an idle and dissolute vagabond, as a worthless citizen, whose nature was reflected in his calling. Perhaps he was all this; perhaps he was more. Yet he would shut himself up in a little back parlor in the squalid little house in which we lived, and there he would work in a frenzy for days together. He would emerge with his nerves in rags, his skin pale, his eyes bloodshot, his linen foul, his clothes and person in disorder, yet under his arm was a new masterpiece, twelve inches by sixteen, which he would carry round to a dealer, who would bully and browbeat him, and screw him down to the last shilling, which he already owed for the rent. He would return home worn out in mind and body by his labors; and for weeks he was unable to bear the sight of a brush or a skin of paint. It was then he would seek to assuage his morbid irritation with the aid of drink. ‘They will place a tablet over this hovel when I am dead,’ he would say, ‘but while I am alive the rope which is needed to hang me outbuys the worth of this tattered carcass.’

“My poor father, rare artist as he was, was right in this estimate of himself. As a man, as a father, as a citizen, I cannot find a word to say for him. He never brought a moment of happiness to either of his girls. He dwelt in a world of his own; a beautiful and enchanted world, the Promised Land of his art. He was a man of strange ambition; of an ambition that had something ferocious in it; of an ambition that was unfitted to cope with the sordid and material aims, by whose aid persons of not one-tenth part of his quality achieved wealth, respectability, power, and the fame of the passing hour. There was a thread of noble austerity in my poor father’s genius, which remained in it, like a vein of gold embedded in the mud of a polluted river, throughout the whole time of his degradation and his ruin. His pride seemed to grow more scornful with each year that witnessed more completely the consummation of the darkening and overthrow of his nature. I can remember his saying of a picture by the president of the Academy, ‘I would rather have my flesh pecked by daws than prostitute myself with such blasphemies as that;’ and at that time he stood upon the verge of the grave of a drunken madman.

“I have said he was not a good citizen. Nor was he a good father to his girls. He did not offer them physical violence; but it never occurred to him to shield them from the indignities thrust upon them by want and debt, and the despair which was sown in their hearts by the foulness of every breath they drew. It would need my father’s own gift to limn the picture of this beautiful talent living its appointed life in its own way, yet indifferent to the most elementary duties of a righteous parent and an honest citizen. As a young man he had been handsome, with a fine, delicate, even an entrancing beauty; it was one of his favorite sayings that the face of every true artist borrowed something from heaven. I can only recall that face in its latter days, when it was that of a petulant, arrogantly imperious, yet hideous and bloated old creature, whose body and soul had been undermined; but from the numerous pictures he painted of himself in his youth he had the divine look of a poet.

“I have always considered it as both cruel and ironical of nature that she should have bestowed upon the daughters of this drunkard and madman, a little of his own originality—divinity, that taint of genius, which brought him to the gutter. Look at me well, my deliverer, and you will see what I mean. If you choose you may read my dreadful secret in my eyes; in the shape of my lips; in the expanse of my nostril. It is there still, although drink and the gutter have defaced its bloom. Look at me, I say, and you will read my poor father’s history. You will see in my face that ambition for which he sought an anodyne in the drinking of drams. Sometimes when he grew tired of painting himself he would have me to sit to him, and he would tell me I was amazingly like him in his youth. He would also take my younger sister as his model, but she did not interest him as much as I. ‘Polly is destined for middle courses,’ he would say. ‘She is neither good fowl, fish, nor flesh. One of these days she will effect a compromise, and will be admitted to membership of the Great Trades Union.’

“‘As for thee, thou little slattern of a wench,’ he would say, running his fingers through my hair, as he cuffed me affectionately, ‘I am afraid to cast thy horoscope. I cannot predict what will become of thee. Such a face as thine, thou dirty one, is born to a dreadful and cynical hatred of things as they are. I can see a bitter scorn in thee for those hare-hearted rogues who run the show. Like thy illustrious father thou wilt live to be a thorn in the bowels of the canaille.’ I was too young at that time to understand what was the meaning of my illustrious parent, but often since, as I have sunk from one stratum of my calling to another—there are degrees in this profession of mine—have I recalled his words, and I have marvelled at his power of seeing into the future.

“It was this father of ours, who before he deferred to the hand of death, launched my sister and myself upon our respective careers in the world. There was nothing hypocritical or pharisaical about this painter and lyric poet. In his heart he never aspired to those principles which he denounced with his lips. He sent our beauty to market as soon as it had reached the age of puberty. He caused us to cease the scrubbing of floors, lest it should roughen our hands. We were turned out upon the streets with rouge on our cheeks; for it seemed to dawn upon him all at once, in one of his Titanic flashes of inspiration, that there was a rational way of obtaining money to buy the brandy for which he craved during every hour of the day.