“What are kings and princes to him,” she said impulsively, “when he looks as if everything that ever was or will be is just nothing to him. He’s like the statues in the museum and if they talked he would listen, but what does he care what little people like us say? I should feel like a doll.”
And she was right; that mouth was made for the large utterance of the early gods, those ears to catch it.
Yet, after dinner, she was persuaded, commanded. The other guests crowded about her. Sir William himself put in his word. And still she refused. Then, coming forward slowly, the Olympian bowed before her, Sir William acting as interpreter.
“Gracious lady, you have given me so much already that it emboldens me to ask for more, since generosity is its own tax. You have afforded me the sight of such beauty as I believed dead with the glories of Greece and Rome. Now I entreat you to revive the poses of their glyptic art that I may carry away from Italy the most beautiful memory of all.”
She could not have refused if she would. The only question in her mind was whether she should soar to undreamed of triumphs or fail ignominiously and for ever. For if the latter, never, never again would she perform.
Let Goethe himself tell the sight which met his eyes.
“The Chevalier Hamilton so long resident here as English Ambassador, so long, too, connoisseur and student of Art and Nature, has found their counterpart and acme with exquisite delight in a lovely girl—English and some twenty years of age. She is exceedingly beautiful and finely made. She wears a Greek garb becoming her to perfection. She then merely loosens her hair, takes a pair of shawls, and effects changes of posture, moods, gestures, mien and appearance that really make one feel as if one were in some dream. Here is visible, complete and bodied forth in movements of surprising variety, all that so many artists have sought in vain to fix and render. Successively standing, kneeling, seated, reclining, grave, sad, sportive, teasing, abandoned, penitent, alluring, threatening, agonized, one follows the other and grows out of it. She knows how to choose and shift the simple folds of her single kerchief for every expression and to adjust it into a hundred kinds of headgear. Her elderly knight holds the torches for her and is absorbed in his soul’s desire. In her he finds the charm of all antiques, the fair profiles on Sicilian coins, the Apollo Belvedere himself. Early to-morrow Tischbein paints her.”
Indeed, he was enraptured. He pleaded to see the lovely show again and received her promise, for Emma knew that she had never so exceeded herself, that she had caught fire at the sun and rained his glories as well as her own on the startled audience. That was her art—her true art, the deep, intense receptivity which Greville had aimed to express and could not. Goethe saw deeper. Even that enchantment could not blind his intensity of percipience. Wonderful, yes, he thought—but yet, was she more than a fair picture, a lovely reflection, a living image? What of soul was there behind it to live on when the sweet face was dust? Too much to ask of a woman perhaps, but this one gave so much that always one wanted, hoped for more. “Geistlos?” Was she? Even he could not tell, and where Goethe was baffled the world must wonder in vain. Soulless? Ah, who shall say?
The last time he saw her she stood in her Pompeian coffin—a long chest, placed upright, and framed with bright gold. She was within it, a lovely Death in bright robes undimmed by the dust of centuries, or so it seemed. A strange fancy. Sir William had protested. Something in the exhibition chilled him. Would she look like that when her eyes were closed for ever and she as much a part of the past as the dead Pompeians themselves? But she would have it, and so in the twilight she stood there, still as death with dreaming lashes on quiet cheek, a faint exquisite smile on locked lips, and hands hanging empty beside her.
There was dead silence at first when she dissolved again into motion. The impression was too strong. A shadow filled the room and made its own silence. Then she sprang from the tomb; roseate, smiling, expectant.