The smoking-sister is now almost as common as a taste for Botticelli, and perhaps equally insincere; but in 1886 there still remained that sense of contrast in both which we have declared the essence of romance. At present those curious people who resent the popular acceptance of an ideal of beauty which they have done their best to popularise are beginning to affect that a taste for Botticelli is a mark of the bourgeoisie. So does the whirligig of time bring in the paradoxer.
A new kind of woman, while she is always the despairing hope of men, is seldom acceptable to women; yet when the evening came and Isabel stood up to recite in New Zion schoolroom, women as well as men were instantaneously attracted. She stood very simply, with one hand lightly touching the table at which Londonderry sat as chairman, and the other at her side; and before she began her first recitation she glanced quietly over the audience, as though her eyes were thus preparing the proper magnetic atmosphere for her voice.
She began with some simple Longfellow poem, that New Zion might feel at home; then she recited a fairy poem called "The Forsaken Merman," which, of course, was only a fairy tale, and yet somehow was so full of human pathos that it was more real than if it had been really "real," that is, prosaic.
For impressing the imagination of her audience she relied mainly on her own imagination and her voice; striking no attitudes, and allowing herself nothing of that facial distortion which is the resort of the unimaginative, and destroys not creates illusion. Of course, her face changed, but the change was one of which she was probably unconscious, and which she couldn't have reproduced to her mirror; it was not a play of features, but a play of lights and shadows and nerves, a flow or an ebb of radiance in the eyes, a subtle sensitiveness of the lips and nerves; and her effect was mainly produced by her voice, over which she wielded indescribable powers of modulation. It was a voice so sympathetic, so intimate, that it almost seemed too intimate, too appealingly sympathetic. It was so a woman might recite to a man she loved, but you almost felt as though the voice were too personal a revelation for an audience,--felt an impulse, so to say, to throw a veil over it, though you were glad from your soul that no one threw it. And the voice was a wonderful actor too. It could act the scenery as well. You saw it all, you heard it all, you felt it all, in the voice:--the great winds blowing shorewards, the wild white horses in the spray,
"The white-walled town,
And the little gray church on the windy shore;"
and when she said, "Down, down, down!" you were indeed in the very depths of the sea--and were all sitting, Mr. Moggridge with the rest, amid coral caves and seaweed, and in a curious green and shimmering light.
But what a world of heart-break there was in her "Come, dear children, come away!" You felt you simply couldn't bear her to say it again. Next time you'd have to cry, and cry you did, and you weren't ashamed, for suddenly when you came out of the trance of the voice you found that every one else was crying too, and Mr. Londonderry had quite forgotten that he was a chairman, and had to be nudged to announce the next piece.
This was a very strange poem, and made you feel like a stained-glass window; it was full of incense, but it was full of something else too. It began
"The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of heaven" ...
and there was something in the voice that suggested such a height up above the world that you drew your breath lest she should fall over. And there was a lover crying in the poem, you could hear him crying far away down on the earth, and there were some lines which went: