The Emancipated

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"Would you mind telling me what her age is?"

"Twenty-seven, last February. To-day she has been mute; generally,
when we are in interesting places, she rather likes to show her
knowledge--of course we encourage her to do so. A blessed form of
vanity, compared with certain things one remembers!"

"She looks as if she had by no means conquered peace of mind,"
observed Mallard, after another silence.

"I don't suppose she has. I don't even know whether she's on the way
to it."

"How about the chapel at Bartles?"

Spence shook his head and laughed, and the dialogue came to an end.

The next morning all started for Rome.

CHAPTER VII

LEARNING AND TEACHING

Easter was just gone by. The Spences had timed their arrival in Rome
so as to be able to spend a few days with certain friends,
undisturbed by bell-clanging and the rush of trippers, before at
length returning to England. Their hotel was in the Babuino.
Mallard, who was uncertain about his movements during the next month
or two, went to quarters with which he was familiar in the Via Bocca
di Leone. He brought his Paestum picture to the hotel, but declined
to leave it there. Mallard was deficient in those properties of the
showman which are so necessary to an artist if he would make his
work widely known and sell it for substantial sums; he hated
anything like private exhibition, and dreaded an offer to purchase
from any one who had come in contact with him by way of friendly
introduction.

"I'm not satisfied with it, now I come to look at it again. It's
nothing but a rough sketch."

"But Seaborne will be here this afternoon," urged Spence. "He will
be grateful if you let him see it."

"If he cares to come to my room, he shall."

Miriam made no remark on the picture, but kept looking at it as long
as it was uncovered. The temples stood in the light of early
morning, a wonderful, indescribable light, perfectly true and
rendered with great skill.

"Is it likely to be soon sold?" she asked, when the artist had gone
off with his canvas.

"As likely as not, he'll keep it by him for a year or two, till he
hates it for a few faults that no one else can perceive or be taught
to understand," was Mr. Spence's reply. "I wish I could somehow
become possessed of it. But if I hinted such a wish, he would insist
on my taking it as a present. An impracticable fellow, Mallard. He
suspects I want to sell it for him; that's why he won't leave it.
And if Seaborne goes to his room, ten to one he'll be received with
growls of surly independence."

This Mr. Seaborne was a man of letters. Spence had made his
acquaintance in Rome a year ago; they conversed casually in Piale's
reading-room, and Seaborne happened to say that the one English
landscape-painter who strongly interested him was a little-known
man, Ross Mallard. His own work was mostly anonymous; he wrote for
one of the quarterlies and one of the weekly reviews. He was a
little younger than Mallard, whom in certain respects he resembled;
he had much the same way of speaking, the same reticence with regard
to his own doings, even a slight similarity of feature, and his life
seemed to be rather a lonely one.

When the two met, they behaved precisely as Spence predicted they
would--with reserve, almost with coldness. For all that, Seaborne
paid a visit to the artist's room, and in a couple of hours' talk
they arrived at a fair degree of mutual understanding. The next day
they smoked together in an odd abode occupied by the literary man
near Porto di Ripetta, and thenceforth were good friends.

The morning after that, Mallard went early to the Vatican. He
ascended the Scala Regia, and knocked at the little red door over
which is written, "Cappella Sistina." On entering, he observed only
a gentleman and a young girl, who stood in the middle of the floor,
consulting their guide-book; but when be had taken a few steps
forward, he saw a lady come from the far end and seat herself to
look at the ceiling through an opera-glass. It was Mrs. Baske, and
he approached whilst she was still intent on the frescoes. The
pausing of his footstep close to her caused her to put down the
glass and regard him. Mallard noticed the sudden change from cold
remoteness of countenance to pleased recognition. The brightening in
her eyes was only for a moment; then she smiled in her usual
half-absent way, and received him formally.

"You are not alone?" he said, taking a place by her as she resumed
her seat.

"Yes, I have come alone." And, after a pause, she added, "We don't
think it necessary always to keep together. That would become
burdensome. I often leave them, and go to places by myself."

Her look was still turned upwards. Mallard followed its direction.

"Which of the Sibyls is your favourite?" he asked.

At once she indicated the Delphic, but without speaking.

"Mine too."

Both fixed their eyes upon the figure, and were silent.

"You have been here very often?" were Mallard's next words.

"Last year very often."

"From genuine love of it, or a sense of duty?" he asked, examining
her face.

She considered before replying.

"Not only from a sense of duty, though of course I have felt that. I
don't _love_ anything of Michael Angelo's, but I am compelled to
look and study. I came here this morning only to refresh my memory
of one of those faces"--she pointed to the lower part of the Last
Judgment--"and yet the face is dreadful to me."

She found that he was smiling, and abruptly she added the question:

"Do you love that picture?"

"Why, no; but I often delight in it. I wouldn't have it always
before me (for that matter, no more would I have the things that I
love). A great work of art may be painful at all times, and
sometimes unendurable."

"I have learnt to understand that," she said, with something of
humility, which came upon Mallard as new and agreeable. "But--it
is not long since that scene represented a reality to me. I think I
shall never see it as you do."

Mallard wished to look at her, but did not.

"I have sometimes been repelled by a feeling of the same kind," he
answered. "Not that I myself ever thought of it as a reality, but I
have felt angry and miserable in remembering that a great part of
the world does. You see the pretty girl there, with her father. I
noticed her awed face as I passed, and heard a word or two of the
man's, which told me that from them there was no question of art.
Poor child! I should have liked to pat her hand, and tell her to be
good and have no fear."

"Did Michael Angelo believe it?" Miriam asked diffidently, when she
had glanced with anxious eyes at the pair of whom he spoke.

"I suppose so. And yet I am far from sure. What about Dante? Haven't
you sometimes stumbled over his grave assurances that this and that
did really befall him? Putting aside the feeble notion that he was a
deluded visionary, how does one reconcile the artist's management of
his poem with the Christian's stem faith? In any case, he was more
poet than Christian when he wrote. Milton makes no such claims; he
merely prays for the enlightenment of his imagination."

Miriam turned from the great fresco, and again gazed at the Sibyls
and Prophets.

"Do the Stanze interest you?" was Mallard's next question.

"Very little, I am sorry to say. They soon weary me."

"And the Loggia?"

"I never paid much attention to it."

"That surprises me. Those little pictures are my favourites of all
Raphael's work. For those and the Psyche, I would give everything
else."

Miriam looked at him inquiringly.

"Are you again thinking of the subjects?" he asked.

"Yes. I can't help it. I have avoided them, because I knew how
impossible it was for me to judge them only as art."

"Then you have the same difficulty with nearly all Italian
pictures?"

She hesitated; but, without turning her eyes to him, said at length:

"I can't easily explain to you the distinction there is for me
between the Old Testament and the New. I was taught almost
exclusively out of the Old--at least, it seems so to me. I have
had to study the New for myself, and it helps rather than hinders my
enjoyment of pictures taken from it. The religion of my childhood
was one of bitterness and violence and arbitrary judgment and
hatred."

"Ah, but there is quite another side to the Old Testament--those
parts of it, at all events, that are illustrated up in the Loggia.
Will you come up there with me?"

She rose without speaking. They left the chapel, and ascended the
stairs.

"You are not under the impression," he said, with a smile, as they
walked side by side, "that the Old Testament is responsible for
those horrors we have just been speaking of?"

"They are in _that_ spirit. My reading of the New omits everything
of the kind."

"So does mine. But we have no justification."

"We can select what is useful to us, and reject what does harm."

"Yes; but then--"

He did not finish the sentence, and they went into the pictured
Loggia. Here, choosing out his favourites, Mallard endeavoured to
explain all his joy in them. He showed her how it was Hebrew history
made into a series of exquisite and touching legends; he dwelt on
the sweet, idyllic treatment, the lovely landscape, the tender
idealism throughout, the perfect adaptedness of gem-like colouring.

Miriam endeavoured to see with his eyes, but did not pretend to be
wholly successful. The very names were discordant to her ear.

"I will buy some photographs of them to take away," she said.

"Don't do that; they are useless. Colour and design are here
inseparable."

They stayed not more than half an hour; then left the Vatican
together, and walked to the front of St. Peter's in silence. Mallard
looked at his watch.

"You are going back to the hotel?"

"I suppose so."

"Shall I call one of those carriages?--I am going to have a walk
on to the Janiculum."

She glanced at the sky.

"There will be a fine view to-day."

"You wouldn't care to come so far?"

"Yes, I should enjoy the walk."

"To walk? It would tire you too much."

"Oh no!" replied Miriam, looking away and smiling. "You mustn't
think I am what I was that winter at Naples. I can walk a good many
miles, and only feel better for it."

Her tone amused him, for it became something like that of a child in
self-defence when accused of some childlike incapacity.

"Then let us go, by all means."

They turned into the Borgo San Spirito, and then went by the quiet
Longara. Mallard soon found that it was necessary to moderate his
swinging stride. He was not in the habit of walking with ladies, and
he felt ashamed of himself when a glance told him that his companion
was put to overmuch exertion. The glance led him to observe Miriam's
gait; its grace and refinement gave him a sudden sensation of keen
pleasure. He thought, without wishing to do so, of Cecily; her
matchless, maidenly charm in movement was something of quite another
kind. Mrs. Baske trod the common earth, yet with, it seemed to him,
a dignity that distinguished her from ordinary women.

There had been silence for a long time. They were alike in the
custom of forgetting what had last been said, or how long since.

"Do you care for sculpture?" Mallard asked, led to the inquiry by
his thoughts of form and motion.

"Yes; but not so much as for painting."

He noticed a reluctance in her voice, and for a moment was quite
unconscious of the reason for it. But reflection quickly explained
her slight embarrassment.

"Edward makes it one of his chief studies," she added at once,
looking straight before her. "He has told me what to read about it."

Mallard let the subject fall. But presently they passed a yoke of
oxen drawing a cart, and, as he paused to look at them, he said:

"Don't you like to watch those animals? I can never be near them
without stopping. Look at their grand heads, their horns, their
majestic movement! They always remind me of the antique--of
splendid power fixed in marble, These are the kind of oxen that
Homer saw, and Virgil."

Miriam gazed, but said nothing.

"Does your silence mean that you can't sympathize with me?"

"No. It means that you have given me a new way of looking at a
thing; and I have to think."

She paused; then, with a curious inflection of her voice, as though
she were not quite certain of the tone she wished to strike, whether
playful or sarcastic:

"You wouldn't prefer me to make an exclamation?"

He laughed.

"Decidedly not. If you were accustomed to do so, I should not be
expressing my serious thoughts."

The pleasant mood continued with him, and, a smile still on his
face, he asked presently:

"Do you remember telling me that you thought I was wasting my life
on futilities?"

Miriam flushed, and for an instant he thought he had offended her.
But her reply corrected this impression.

"You admitted, I think, that there was much to be said for my view."

"Did I? Well, so there is. But the same conviction may be reached by
very different paths. If we agreed in that one result, I fancy it
was the sole and singular point of concord."

Miriam inquired diffidently:

"Do you still think of most things just as you did then?"

"Of most things, yes."

"You have found no firmer hope in which to work?"

"Hope? I am not sure that I understand you."

He looked her in the face, and she said hurriedly:

"Are you still as far as ever from satisfying yourself? Does your
work bring you nothing but a comparative satisfaction?"

"I am conscious of having progressed an inch or two on the way of
infinity," Mallard replied. "That brings me no nearer to an end."

"But you _have_ a purpose; you follow it steadily. It is much to be
able to say that."

"Do you mean it for consolation?"

"Not in any sense that you need resent," Miriam gave answer, a
little coldly.

"I felt no resentment. But I should like to know what sanction of a
life's effort you look for, now? We talked once, perhaps you
remember, of one kind of work being 'higher' than another. How do
you think now on that subject?"

She made delay before saying:

"It is long since I thought of it at all. I have been too busy
learning the simplest things to trouble about the most difficult."

"To learn, then, has been _your_ object all this time. Let me
question you in turn. Do you find it all-sufficient?"

"No; because I have begun too late. I am doing now what I ought to
have done when I was a girl, and I have always the feeling of being
behindhand."

"But the object, in itself, quite apart from your progress? Is it
enough to study a variety of things, and feel that you make some
progress towards a possible ideal of education? Does this suffice to
your life?"

She answered confusedly:

"I can't know yet; I can't see before me clearly enough."

Mallard was on the point of pressing the question, but he refrained,
and shaped his thought in a different way.

"Do you think of remaining in England?"

"Probably I shall."

"You will return to your home in Lancashire?"

"I haven't yet determined," she replied formally.

The dialogue seemed to be at an end. Unobservant of each other, they
reached the Via Crucis, which leads up to S. Pietro in Montorio.
Arrived at the terrace, they stood to look down on Rome.

"After all, you are tired," said Mallard, when he had glanced at
her.

"Indeed I am not."

"But you are hungry. We have been forgetting that it is
luncheon-time."

"I pay little attention to such hours. One can always get something
to eat."

"It's all very well for people like myself to talk in that way,"
said Mallard, with a smile, "but women have orderly habits of life."

"For which you a little despise them?" she returned, with grave face
fixed on the landscape.

"Certainly not. It's only that I regard their life as wholly
different from my own. Since I was a boy, I have known nothing of
domestic regularity."

"You sometimes visit your relatives?"

"Yes. But their life cannot he mine. It is domestic in such a degree
that it only serves to remind me how far apart I am."

"Do you hold that an artist cannot live like other people, in the
habits of home?"

"I think such habits are a danger to him. He _may_ find a home, if
fate is exceptionally kind."

Pointing northwards to a ridged hill on the horizon, he asked in
another voice if she knew its name.

"You mean Mount Soracte?"

"Yes. You don't know Latin, or it would make you quote Horace."

She shook her head, looked down, and spoke more humbly than he had
ever yet heard her.

"But I know it in an English translation."

"Well, that's more than most women do."

He said it in a grudging way. The remark itself was scarcely civil,
but he seemed all at once to have a pleasure in speaking roughly, in
reminding her of her shortcomings. Miriam turned her eyes in another
quarter, and presently pointed to the far blue hills just seen
between the Alban and the Sabine ranges.

"Through there is the country of the Volsci," she said, in a subdued
voice. "Some Roman must have stood here and looked towards it, in
days when Rome was struggling for supremacy with them. Think of all
that happened between that day and the time when Horace saw the snow
on Soracte; and then, of all that has happened since."

He watched her face, and nodded several times. They pursued the
subject, and reminded each other of what the scene suggested, point
by point. Mallard felt surprise, though he showed none. Cecily,
standing here, would have spoken with more enthusiasm, but it was
doubtful whether she would have displayed Miriam's accuracy of
knowledge.

"Well, let us go," he said at length. "You don't insist on walking
home?"

"There is no need to, I think. I could quite well, if I wished."

"I am going to run through a few of the galleries for a morning or
two. I wonder whether you would care to come with me to-morrow?"

"I will come with pleasure."

"That is how people speak when they don't like to refuse a
troublesome invitation."

"Then what am I to say? I spoke the truth, in quite simple words."

"I suppose it was your tone; you seemed too polite."

"But what is your objection to politeness?" Miriam asked naively.

"Oh, I have none, when it is sincere. But as soon as I had asked
you, I felt afraid that I was troublesome."

"If I had felt that, I should have expressed it unmistakably," she
replied, in a voice which reminded him of the road from Baiae to
Naples.

"Thank you; that is what I should wish."

Having found a carriage for her, and made an appointment for the
morning, he watched her drive away.

A few hours later, he encountered Spence in the Piazza Colonna, and
they went together into a _caffe_. Spence had the news that Mrs.
Lessingham and her niece would arrive on the third day from now.
Their stay would be of a fortnight at longest.

"I met Mrs. Baske at the Vatican this morning," said Mallard
presently, as he knocked the ash off his cigar. "We had some talk."

"On Vatican subjects?"

"Yes. I find her views of art somewhat changed. But sculpture still
alarms her."

"Still? Do you suppose she will ever overcome that feeling? Are you
wholly free from it yourself? Imagine yourself invited. to conduct a
party of ladies through the marbles, and to direct their attention
to the merits that strike you."

"No doubt I should invent an excuse. But it would be weakness."

"A weakness inseparable from our civilization. The nude in art. is
an anachronism."

"Pooh! That is encouraging the vulgar prejudice."

"No; it is merely stating a vulgar fact. These collections of nude
figures in marble have only an historical interest. They are kept
out of the way, in places which no one is obliged to visit. Modern
work of that kind is tolerated, nothing more. What on earth is the
good of an artistic production of which people in general are afraid
to speak freely? You take your stand before the Venus of the
Capitol; you bid the attendant make it revolve slowly, and you begin
a lecture to your wife, your sister, or your young cousin, on the
glories of the masterpiece. You point out in detail how admirably
Praxiteles has exhibited every beauty of the female frame. Other
ladies are standing by you smile blandly, and include them in your
audience."

Mallard interrupted with a laugh.

"Well, why not?" continued the other. "This isn't the _gabinetto_ at
Naples, surely?"

"But you are well aware that, practically, it comes to the same
thing. How often is one half pained, half amused, at the behaviour
of women in the Tribune at Florence! They are in a false position;
it is absurd to ridicule them for what your own sensations justify.
For my own part, I always leave my wife and Mrs. Baske to go about
these galleries without my company. If I can't be honestly at my
ease, I won't make pretence of being so."

"All this is true enough, but the prejudice is absurd. We ought to
despise it and struggle against it."

"Despise it, many of us do, theoretically. But to make practical
demonstrations against it, is to oppose, as I said, all the
civilization of our world. Perhaps there will come a time once more
when sculpture will be justified; at present the art doesn't and
can't exist. Its relics belong to museums--in the English sense of
the word."

"You only mean by this," said Mallard, "that art isn't for the
multitude. We know that well enough."

"But there's a special difficulty about this point. We come across
it in literature as well. How is it that certain pages in
literature, which all intellectual people agree in pro flouncing
just as pure as they are great, could never be read aloud, say, in a
family circle, without occasioning pain and dismay? No need to give
illustrations; they occur to you in abundance. We skip them, or we
read mutteringly, or we say frankly that this is not adapted for
reading aloud. Yet no man would frown if he found his daughter bent
over the book. There's something radically wrong here."

"This is the old question of our English Puritanism. In France, here
in Italy, there is far less of such feeling."

"Far less; but why must there be any at all? And Puritanism isn't a
sufficient explanation. The English Puritans of the really Puritan
time had freedom of conversation which would horrify us of to-day.
We become more and more prudish as what we call civilization
advances. It is a hateful fact that, from the domestic point of
view, there exists no difference between some of the noblest things
in art and poetry, and the obscenities which are prosecuted; the one
is as impossible of frank discussion as the other."

"The domestic point of view is contemptible. It means the bourgeois
point of view, the Philistine point of view."

"Then I myself, if I had children, should be both bourgeois and
Philistine. And so, I have a strong suspicion, would you too."

"Very well," replied Mallard, with some annoyance, "then it is one
more reason why an artist should have nothing to do with
domesticities. But look here, you are wrong as regards me. If ever I
marry, _amico mio_, my wife shall learn to make more than a
theoretical distinction between what is art and what is grossness.
If ever I have children, they shall from the first he taught a
natural morality, and not the conventional. If I can afford good
casts of noble statues, they shall stand freely about my house. When
I read aloud, by the fire side, there shall be no skipping or
muttering or frank omissions; no, by Apollo! If a daughter of mine
cannot describe to me the points of difference between the Venus of
the Capitol and that of the Medici, she shall be bidden to use her
eyes and her brains better. I'll have no contemptible prudery in my
house!"

"Bravissimo!" cried Spenee, laughing. "I see that my cousin Miriam
is not the only person who has progressed during these years. Do you
remember a certain conversation of ours at Posillipo about the
education of a certain young lady?"

"Yes, I do. But that was a different matter. The question was not of
Greek statues and classical books, but of modern pruriencies and
shallowness and irresponsibility."

"You exaggerated then, and you do so now," said Spence; "at present
with less excuse."

Mallard kept silence for a space; then said:

"Let us speak of what we have been avoiding. How has that marriage
turned out?"

"I have told you all I know. There's no reason to suppose that
things are anything but well."

"I don't like her coming abroad alone; I have no faith in that plea
of work. I suspect things are _not_ well."

"A cynic--which I am not--would suggest that a wish had
something to do with the thought."

"He would be cynically wrong," replied Mallard, with calmness.

"Why shouldn't she come abroad alone? There's nothing alarming in
the fact that they no longer need to see each other every hour. And
one takes for granted that _they_, at all events, are not bourgeois;
their life won't be arranged exactly like that of Mr. and Mrs. Jones
the greengrocers."

"No," said the other, musingly.

"In what direction do you imagine that Cecily will progress?
Possibly she has become acquainted with disillusion."

"Possibly?"

"Well, take it for certain. Isn't that an inevitable step in her
education? Things may still be well enough, philosophically
speaking. She has her life to live--we know it will be to the end
a modern life. _Servetur ad imum_--and so on; that's what one
would wish, I suppose? We have no longer to take thought for her."

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