The Tree of Knowledge: A Novel

by Mrs. Baillie Reynolds

Miss Ellen lay on her couch near the window, and, as she stretched her thin hand in kindly greeting, her guest was much impressed by the refined and intellectual type of her features, and their lovable expression. In the blue, shadowy eyes, with their long lashes, underlined as they were with the purple marks of suffering, and wrinkling in the corners with advancing years, could be clearly traced the wreck of the same beauty which was budding in Elaine. Miss Emily too was handsome, though a hard expression robbed her face of the charm of her sister's. Little Miss Fanny, in her plump and plaintive amiability, was also prepossessing in her way, Charlotte only, with massive jaw, large features, high forehead, and stony gaze, conveyed a feeling of awe.

This forehead was not only high but polished. It shone and twinkled in the light, as though the skin were too tightly stretched on the bony knobs of the skull beneath. The sparse hair was tightly strained away from it above—the frowning sandy eyebrows failed to soften it below. Lady Mabel guessed at once who was the ruling spirit of this unconventual sisterhood.

The furniture of the room was the furniture of a by-gone day, when art had not been promulgated, and nobody thought of considering beauty as in any sense an important factor of one's happiness. In that sad period the fated Misses Willoughbys' youth had been cast. Alas! for the waste of good material which must then have been the rule! Girls intended by nature to be beautiful and charming, yet who, by dint of never comprehending their mission, managed only to be ugly and clumsy. The parents of these girls had forgotten the sweet and harmonious names of their Anglo-Saxon ancestry. There were no more Ediths, or Ethels, or Cicelys, or Dorothys. Even the age of Lady Betty had passed and gone. Amelia, Caroline and Charlotte, Maria and Augusta were the order of the day.

It agonizes one only to think of the way those unlucky girls violated the laws of taste. Their fathers surrounded them with bulky mahogany furniture, and green and blue woollen damask. No wonder they dressed themselves in harrowing mixture of magenta and pink and mauve. Why should they trouble to arrange their hair with any view to preserving the contour of their head, when every tea-cup they used was a monstrosity, every jug or bowl the violation of a law?

The delicate fancy of Wedgewood and his school was banished and ignored with the Chippendale furniture and all the other graces of their grandfathers. Everything must be as large as possible, and as unwieldy. The questions of beauty and of usefulness were as nothing if only the table or chair were sufficiently cumbersome.

Mercifully for us that terrible time of degradation was short. A violent reaction soon set in. But the period left its marks behind it—left a generation which it had infected and lowered, out of whom it had knocked all the romance, from whom it had extracted, in some fatal way, the faculty to appreciate the beautiful, and the Misses Willoughby, house and all, were a living monument of its hideous influence.

The furniture remained as it had been in the life-time of their father. The sisters never wore anything out, so what would have been the object of renewing it? Everything looked as it used to look, and was arranged as it had been arranged in the days of their wasted girlhood, what could Elaine desire further? She would fare as they had done. It seldom occurred to them that their mode of life left anything to be desired.

Let it not for a moment be thought that the study of art is here advocated as a remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to, or that the laws of beauty are in any way suggested as a substitute for those higher laws without which life must be incomplete. It is of course more than possible for a woman with no eye at all for color, and an absolute disregard for symmetry, to lead the life of a heroine or a saint. And yet an innate instinct seems to suggest a close connection between the beauty of holiness and all the other million forms in which beauty is hourly submitted to our eye; and it seems just within the limits of possibility that a link should exist between the decadence of taste and the undoubted and unparalleled stagnation of religious life which certainly was to be found side by side with it.

If we believe, as it is to be supposed Christians must, that a purpose exists in all the loveliness which is scattered about so lavishly through the natural world, then surely it follows that we can hardly afford to do quite without the help so afforded us, lest, in forgetting the loveliness of nature, we lose our aspiration towards the perfection of nature's God.

Certainly, in the Willoughby family, the sister who evidently had the strongest feeling for beauty was the sister who most strongly suggested the Christian ideal of the spiritual life.