“You must break a centaur in half,” said she, “before I can admire it. And, if I am to look at a satyr, pray let the goat’s legs be hid in the bushes. I cannot embrace in one conception these fragments of man and brute. Come with me to the neighbouring gallery; I wish to show you a Jupiter, seated at the further end of it, which made half a Pagan of me this morning as I stood venerating it.”
“The head of your Jupiter,” said Winston, as they approached it, “is surpassed, I think, by more than one bust of the same god that we have already seen; and I find something of stiffness or rigidity in the figure; but the impression it makes, as a whole, is very grand.”
“It will grow wonderfully on you as you look at it,” said Mildred. “How well it typifies all that a Pagan would conceive of the supreme ruler of the skies, the controller of the powers of nature, the great administrator of the world who has the Fates for his council! His power irresistible, but no pride in it, no joy, no triumph. He is without passion. In his right hand lies the thunder, but it reposes on his thigh; and his left hand rests calmly upon his tall sceptre surmounted by an eagle. In his countenance there is the tranquillity of unquestioned supremacy; but there is no repose. There is care; a constant, wakefulness. It is the governor of a nature whose elements have never known one moment’s pause.”
“I see it as you speak,” said Winston. Winston then proposed that they should go together and look at the Apollo; but Mildred excused herself.
“I have paid my devotions to the god,” she said, “this morning, when the eyes and the mind were fresh. I would not willingly displace the impression that I now carry away for one which would be made on a fatigued and jaded attention.”
“Is it not godlike?”
“Indeed it is. I was presumptuous enough to think I knew the Apollo. A cast of the head—esteemed to be a very good one—my uncle had given me. I placed it in my own room; for a long time it was the first thing that the light fell upon, or my eyes opened to, in the morning; and in my attempts at crayons I copied it, I believe, in every aspect. It seemed to me therefore that on visiting the Apollo I should recognise an old acquaintance. No such thing. The cast had given me hardly any idea of the statue itself. There was certainly no feeling of old acquaintanceship. The brow, as I stood in front of the god, quite overawed me; involuntarily I retreated for an instant; you will smile, but I had to muster my courage before I could gaze steadily at it.”
“I am not surprised; the divinity there is in no gentle mood. How majestic! and yet how lightly it touches the earth! It is buoyant with godhead.”
“What strikes me,” continued Mildred, “as the great triumph of the artist, is this very anger of the god. It is an anger, which, like the arrow he has shot from his bow, spends itself entirely upon his victim; there is no recoil, as in human passion, upon the mind of him who feels it. There is no jar there. The lightning strikes down—it tarries not a moment in the sky above.”
We are giving, we are afraid, in these reports of Mildred’s conversation, an erroneous impression of the speaker. We collect together what often was uttered with some pauses between, and, owing to a partiality to our heroine, we are more anxious to report her sentiments than those of her companion. She is thus made to speak in a somewhat elaborate style, very different from her real manner, and represented as rather the greater talker of the two; whereas she was more disposed to listen than to speak, and spoke always with the greatest simplicity—with enthusiasm, it is true, but never with effort, or display of diction.