'Oh yes,' said Fan, gleefully; 'go out, Len, or you will never be able to endure Harry afterward, for your counterpart will be peeping out, and then woe to your pride!'
'No danger,' said Henrietta, 'that's perfectly invulnerable. Lenox may remain; it will be a wholesome discipline for him—a warning, you know, my hero; although, girls, Lenox is tolerably faultless,
'Little he loves but a Frau or a feast,
Little he fears but a protest or priest.'
Praed altered. Sit down, disciple, at my feet if you will; I am in the oratorical mood to-day. Hypatia, if you please, not Grace the Less.'
There was a pretty picture of the Immaculée Conception over the sofa, one of those lithographs that you see in every bookstore, that Bertha fancied because it was 'sweet.' The Virgin, a woman with a child-angel's face, and the mezzo-luna beneath her feet. That artist knew what he was about, sir. I'd give more for a picture with a good, deep idea, boldly launched forth, than for a thousand of your smiling, proper, natural 'studies,' and Bridal Scenes, and Dramatic or Historical Snatches. If artists, now, were all poets and scholars, as they should be, it would be the work and delirious rapture of a life to go through a gallery as large as our Dusseldorf. Men would go there to write novels and histories, and women to learn to be good and beautiful—that is, to learn to think. Oh, what a school for great and small! But when is this new era of the real and the true in art to begin? You boy artists, who are just opening glad eyes to the glorious light, the great world looks to you to inaugurate the new, to pour ancient lore and mystic symbols and grand old art into the waiting crucible, and melt the whole, with your burning, creative genius, into forms and conceptions before which, hearts shall be silent in very rapture. But the time is not yet. One here and there cannot change the Iron to a Golden Age, and it is to thoughts rather than their great embodiments that earnest art-worshippers now bow. And yet men fancy they are artists, dream of a fame glorious as that of Phidias! Why there's young Acajou, who chiselled a very respectable hound out of a stray lump of marble, stealthily, by a candle, or more probably a spirit lamp, in his father's cellar—was discovered and straightway heroized. I don't say the boy hasn't talent, genius if you will; but it isn't the genius that will overflow his soul and etherealize his whole nature. Yet already he 'progresses like a giantess,' has attracted some attention in the Academy, and will directly be sent to Rome. But the idea! I know him too well! The other night I heard him criticizing Michael Angelo! and when I gave him an engraving of that delicious Psyche of Theed's to admire, the creature talked as if she were a manikin or a robed skeleton! Is there nothing due to the idea, Acajou? 'The idea!' dear me, why he didn't exactly know what the idea was! So he'll go trolling about the Louvre and the Luxembourg gallery, the Pitti palace and all Rome, and his mind will be as full of elbows and collar bones as the catacombs; he'll talk to you of the Grecian line of beauty and of 'pose,' and sketch you such a glorious arm or ankle that you, fair lady, wouldn't know it from your own! But do you see a single softened line in his own face? Has he ever drunk deep draughts from old fountains of poesy? Has he ever thought of the Vatican library—even though to long is all he may do? Oh no! He says mythology is a wornout dream, and insulting to a Christian age; that it's all well enough to know Jupiter and Bacchus (Silenus too?) and Venus and the head men back there, but this century wants originality, progress! Oh, pshaw!
Oh, but I was saying that Our Lady stood over the half moon, and Henrietta sat below it, with that soft cashmere morning dress, fighting all around her to see which fold should cling most lovingly to her graceful form. It was all a delicious poem to me, and if I were Horace, you would have had a splendid ode. Oh, well!
'Why, what a Joseph he is!' said Henrietta, waking me out of this reverie.
'Oh,' said I, starting, 'how did you know that?'
'Only conjecture, my dear friend; but when we see a man with his eyes fixed in that ghostly way, and his mustaches and all in perfect repose, we reasonably imagine that he's seeing visions; and I suppose you'll come flaming out presently with some dreams that shall have, for remote consequences, a throne in some Eastern paradise, and a princess, perhaps—who knows?'
'Who knows?' echoed I; 'but go on, Hypatia.'