“I am glad to be an antidote to poison. But have you no fears of such baleful intercourse?”
“None. As a man of the world, I must know the perilous as well as the safe among my race. How am to become as wise as the serpent, unless I study the serpent? I find Densdeth a most valuable preceptor. He has sounded every man’s heart, in life or history, and can state the depth of evil there in fathoms, feet, and inches. I could no more do without him for that side of my education, than I could spare your dove-like teaching to make me harmless as a dove. Pardon my giving you this unmasculine office.”
“You speak lightly, Mr. Byng. I fear you are a man who has not yet fully made up his mind.”
“What? As to the great choice, — Hercules’s choice? Virtue or Vice? yes, I am absolutely committed. Virtue has me fast. In fact, I am deemed quite a Puritan, as men go; I should be so not to shame my ancestors.”
“Forgive me if I ask, Do you know what Evil is?”
“I suppose so; as much as is to be known.”
“O, you cannot! You would not trifle with it, if you dreamed how it soils. You would fly it.”
“Not face it?”
“Never, unless duty commanded you to face and crush it. Those who know Evil best fly farthest, hide deepest, dread its approach, shudder at the thought of its pursuit. It is so terribly subtle. The bravest are not brave before it; the strongest are not strong; the purest are not pure. It makes cowards of the brave, it paralyzes the strong, it taints the pure. No one is safe, — no one, until personal agony has made him hate Evil worse than death. Mr. Byng, you have a noble soul; but no soul can safely palter with a bad man. Palter! I use strong words. I mean to use them. You have spoken lightly and pained me. To a bad man — to some bad men — every pure soul is a perpetual reproach, and must be sullied. You speak plainly of this Densdeth; you understand his bad influence, and yet you deal with him as if he were some inert chemical combination, which you could safely handle and analyze. Such a being is never inert; the less active he seems, the more he is likely to be insidiously at work to ruin. Forgive me, my dear friend, that I warn you so eagerly against this fatal curiosity!”
He had spoken with fervid energy and eloquence. In fact, there was in this strange young genius a passionate ardor, always latent, only waiting to flame forth, when his heart was touched. And when some deeper interest stirred him, — when he had some protest to utter against wrong, — his large, melancholy eyes grew intense, his voice lost its pensive sadness; color came to his thin, sallow cheeks. It was so now. For a moment, he was almost beautiful with this sudden evanescent inspiration.
I paused after his eager outburst, watching him with such admiration as we give to a great actor, and then — for I confess that my conceit was somewhat offended by this good advice, from one in years so much my junior — I said, with a confident smile: “You talk like a Cassandra. What do you foresee so very terrible, as about to befall me? Pray do not be uneasy! I am an old stager. I have managed to make my way thus far in my life without being worse than my fellows. ‘I am indifferent honest.’ I will try to remain so, despite of the seductions of Bugaboo. And then, you know, I cannot go far wrong with you for Mentor.”
My tone seemed to pain him. He painted some moments in silence on his Lear.
While he painted, I observed him, — interested much in the picture of his creation, more in the creator. “Raphael-Angelico,” I thought, “he merits the name fully. What a delicate being! The finest organization I have ever seen in man. How strangely his personality affects me! And every moment fancies drift across my mind that I actually know his secret, and am blind, purposely blind to my knowledge, because I promised him when we first met that I would be so.”
Another Cassandra
Dreeme went on slowly and carefully with his work, after my closing remark of the last chapter. I continued to observe him for some moments in silence. His palette and brushes were kept with extreme neatness. The colors on the palette were arranged methodically, with an eye to artistic gradation; so that the darker of the smooth, oily drops squeezed from his paint-tubes made, as it were, a horizon of shadow on the outer rim of the palette. Within this little amphitheatre of hillocks, black, indigo, and brown, the dashes of brighter hue were disposed in concentric arcs, shading toward pure white at the focus. All his utensils and materials betokened the same orderliness and refinement; nothing was out of place, nothing daubed or soiled. So careful too was his handling, that he needed no over-sleeve to protect his own. The delicate hand and the flexible wrist seemed incapable of an awkward or a blundering motion. He could no more do a slovenly thing, than he could dance a break-down or smoke a pipe. This personal neatness was specially beautiful to me. In my laboratory, at my task of splitting atoms and unbraiding gases, I learnt from the exquisite order and proportion that Nature never forgets in her combinations to require the same of men. I found it in Dreeme. His genius in art was not of the ill-regulated, splashy, blotchy, boisterous class. Nothing coarse could come from those fine fingers.
“You elaborate your work with great care,” said I, after some moments’ silence, while the painter had been touching in dots of light, and then pausing, studying, and touching again, here a point and there a line.
“I must be careful and elaborate. It is partly the timidity of a novice. I feel that my hand lacks the precision of practice, — the rapid, unerring touch of a master. But besides, now, as my work approaches completion, I perceive a failure in creative power. I work feebly and painfully.”
“Creative power of course is temporarily exhausted by a complete consistent creation. Jove felt empty-headed enough when he had thought Minerva into being. Lie fallow for a season, and your brain will teem again with images!”
“Yes, that is the law; but you must remember that my case is solitary. My picture is a spasm. It came to me prematurely, as a purpose and a power come in the paroxysms of a fever. I have spent all my large force in it.”
“Your picture is older, subject and handling, than you, as I have said before. But music, painting, and poetry are gifts of the gods to the young.”
“Older than my years? Ah yes!” he said, drearily. “I was in the immortal misery when I poured out my soul there. It was sore, sore, sore work. I pray that I may never need to create tragedy again. I pray that no new or ancient experience may compel me to confess and confide it to the impersonal world. No, I have wreaked my anguish, my pity, my shame for the guilty, on that canvas, and the virtue is gone out of me.”
“Essay another vein! You have worked off bitterness. Open your heart to sweetness! In brighter mood, you will do fairer things without the tragic element.”
“Since you and Locksley compelled me to accept the sweet gift of a life more hopeful, I have made some sketches in a less severe manner than my Lear. That was cruel tragedy. These are only anecdotes.”
“Pray exhibit!”
“To so gentle a critic, I venture. Do not expect passion, — that I wished to spare myself. The sentiment is simple and commonplace enough.”
He placed before me three sketchy pictures, able and rapid.
“You see,” said he, “I play upon one idea or its reverse.”
The first sketch depicted a young girl, caught in a snow-storm, and sunk, a mere shapeless thing, among the drifts in a dreary pine-wood. A gentleman, in the costume of a Puritan soldier, stooped over her. Beside him stood a sturdy yeoman with a cloak and a basket. A few sunbeams cleft the pines,