Part 6 (1/2)

'I wear it for a testimony and a sign that a man has no right to be ashamed of the mark of manhood. Oh, that one or two of your Protestant clergymen, who ought to be perfect ideal men, would have the courage to get up into the pulpit in a long beard, and testify that the very essential idea of Protestantism is the dignity and divinity of man as G.o.d made him! Our forefathers were not ashamed of their beards; but now even the soldier is only allowed to keep his moustache, while our quill-driving ma.s.ses shave themselves as close as they can; and in proportion to a man's piety he wears less hair, from the young curate who shaves off his whiskers, to the Popish priest who shaves his crown!'

'What do you say, then, to cutting off nuns' hair?'

'I say, that extremes meet, and prudish Manichaeism always ends in sheer indecency. Those Papists have forgotten what woman was made for, and therefore, they have forgotten that a woman's hair is her glory, for it was given to her for a covering: as says your friend, Paul the Hebrew, who, by the bye, had as fine theories of art as he had of society, if he had only lived fifteen hundred years later, and had a chance of working them out.'

'How remarkably orthodox you are!' said Lancelot, smiling.

'How do you know that I am not? You never heard me deny the old creed. But what if an artist ought to be of all creeds at once? My business is to represent the beautiful, and therefore to accept it wherever I find it. Yours is to be a philosopher, and find the true.'

'But the beautiful must be truly beautiful to be worth anything; and so you, too, must search for the true.'

'Yes; truth of form, colour, chiaroscuro. They are worthy to occupy me a life; for they are eternal--or at least that which they express: and if I am to get at the symbolised unseen, it must be through the beauty of the symbolising phenomenon. If I, who live by art, for art, in art, or you either, who seem as much a born artist as myself, am to have a religion, it must be a wors.h.i.+p of the fountain of art--of the

”Spirit of beauty, who doth consecrate With his own hues whate'er he s.h.i.+nes upon.”'

'As poor Sh.e.l.ley has it; and much peace of mind it gave him!'

answered Lancelot. 'I have grown sick lately of such dreary tinsel abstractions. When you look through the glitter of the words, your ”spirit of beauty” simply means certain shapes and colours which please you in beautiful things and in beautiful people.'

'Vile nominalist! renegade from the ideal and all its glories!' said Claude, laughing.

'I don't care sixpence now for the ideal! I want not beauty, but some beautiful thing--a woman perhaps,' and he sighed. 'But at least a person--a living, loving person--all lovely itself, and giving loveliness to all things! If I must have an ideal, let it be, for mercy's sake, a realised one.'

Claude opened his sketch-book.

'We shall get swamped in these metaphysical oceans, my dear dreamer.

But lo, here come a couple, as near ideals as any in these degenerate days--the two poles of beauty: the milieu of which would be Venus with us Pagans, or the Virgin Mary with the Catholics.

Look at them! Honoria the dark--symbolic of pa.s.sionate depth; Argemone the fair, type of intellectual light! Oh, that I were a Zeuxis to unite them instead of having to paint them in two separate pictures, and split perfection in half, as everything is split in this piecemeal world!'

'You will have the honour of a sitting this afternoon, I suppose, from both beauties?'

'I hope so, for my own sake. There is no path left to immortality, or bread either, now for us poor artists but portrait-painting.'

'I envy you your path, when it leads through such Elysiums,' said Lancelot.

'Come here, gentlemen both!' cried Argemone from the bridge.

'Fairly caught!' grumbled Lancelot. 'You must go, at least; my lameness will excuse me, I hope.'

The two ladies were accompanied by Bracebridge, a gazelle which he had given Argemone, and a certain miserable cur of Honoria's adopting, who plays an important part in this story, and, therefore, deserves a little notice. Honoria had rescued him from a watery death in the village pond, by means of the colonel, who had revenged himself for a pair of wet feet by utterly corrupting the dog's morals, and teaching him every week to answer to some fresh scandalous name.

But Lancelot was not to escape. Instead of moving on, as he had hoped, the party stood looking over the bridge, and talking--he took for granted, poor thin-skinned fellow--of him. And for once his suspicions were right; for he overheard Argemone say--

'I wonder how Mr. Smith can be so rude as to sit there in my presence over his stupid perch! Smoking those horrid cigars, too!

How selfish those field-sports do make men!'

'Thank you!' said the colonel, with a low bow. Lancelot rose.

'If a country girl, now, had spoken in that tone,' said he to himself, 'it would have been called at least ”saucy”--but Mammon's elect ones may do anything. Well--here I come, limping to my new tyrant's feet, like Goethe's bear to Lili's.'