There was Mr. Bullivant, the enthusiastic young sculptor, with the mangy flow of flaxen hair, and the plump, waxy face, who wrote poetry, and showed, by various sonnets, that he again differed completely about the young lady from the Dowager Countess of Brambledown and Mr. Gimble. This gentleman sang fluently, on paper—using, by the way, a professional epithet—about her “chiselled mouth”,
“Which breathed of rapture and the balmy South.”
He expatiated on
“Her sweet lips smiling at her dimpled chin,
Whose wealth of kisses gods might long to win—”
and much more to the same maudlin effect. In plain prose, the ardent Bullivant was all for the lower part of the young lady’s face, and actually worried her, and Mr. Blyth, and everybody in the house, until he got leave to take a cast of it.
Lastly, there was Mrs. Blyth’s father; a meek old gentleman, with a continual cold in the head; who lived on marvelously to the utmost verge of human existence—as very poor men, with very large families, who would be much better out of this world than in it, very often do. There was this low-speaking, mildly-infirm, and perpetually-snuffling engraver, who, on being asked to mention what he most admired in her, answered that he thought it was her hair, “which was of such a nice light brown color; or, perhaps, it might be the pleasant way in which she carried her head, or, perhaps, her shoulders—or, perhaps, her head and shoulders, both together. Not that his opinion was good for much in tasty matters of this kind, for which reason he begged to apologize for expressing it at all.” In speaking thus of his opinion, the worthy engraver surely depreciated himself most unjustly: for, if the father of eight daughters cannot succeed in learning (philoprogenitively speaking) to be a good judge of women, what man can?
However, there was one point on which Mr. Gimble, Lady Brambledown, Mr. Bullivant, Mrs. Blyth’s father, and hosts of friends besides, were all agreed, without one discordant exception.
They unanimously asserted that the young lady’s face was the nearest living approach they had ever seen to that immortal “Madonna” face, which has for ever associated the idea of beauty with the name of RAPHAEL. The resemblance struck everybody alike, even those who were but slightly conversant with pictures, the moment they saw her. Taken in detail, her features might be easily found fault with. Her eyes might be pronounced too large, her mouth too small, her nose not Grecian enough for some people’s tastes. But the general effect of these features, the shape of her head and face, and especially her habitual expression, reminded all beholders at once, and irresistibly, of that image of softness, purity, and feminine gentleness, which has been engraven on all civilized memories by the “Madonnas” of Raphael.
It was in consequence of this extraordinary resemblance, that her own English name of Mary had been, from the first, altered and Italianized by Mr. and Mrs. Blyth, and by all intimate friends, into “Madonna.” One or two extremely strict and extremely foolish people objected to any such familiar application of this name, as being open, in certain directions, to an imputation of irreverence. Mr. Blyth was not generally very quick at an answer; but, on this occasion, he had three answers ready before the objections were quite out of his friends’ mouths.
In the first place, he said that he and his friends used the name only in an artist-sense, and only with reference to Raphael’s pictures. In the next place, he produced an Italian dictionary, and showed that “Madonna” had a second meaning in the language, signifying simply and literally, “My lady.” And, in conclusion, he proved historically, that “Madonna” had been used in the old times as a prefix to the names of Italian women; quoting, for example, “Madonna Pia,” whom he happened to remember just at that moment, from having once painted a picture from one of the scenes of her terrible story. These statements silenced all objections; and the young lady was accordingly much better known in the painter’s house as “Madonna” than as “Mary.”