 | People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction |  |
LIGHT VERVAIN.
Provoking souls to mirth and easy laughter.”
—Old Somebody.
Dined with F—, the artist, at a trattoria. F— is a man of
genius, very adventurous and imaginative in his art, but never
caring to show the least touch of these qualities in his conversation.
His pictures have given him great vogue and consideration
at Rome, so that his daily experience furnishes staple enough for
his evening's chit-chat, and he seems, of course, to be always
talking of himself. He is very generally set down as an egotist.
His impulse to talk, however, springs from no wish for self-glorification,
but rather from an indolent aptness to lay hands on
the readiest and most familiar topic, and that is a kind of egotism
to which I have very little objection—particularly with the mind
fatigued, as it commonly is in Rome, by a long day's study of
works of art.
I had passed the morning at the Barberini palace with a party
of picture-hunters, and I made some remark as to the variety of
impressions made upon the minds of different people by the same
picture. Apropos of this remark, F— told me a little anecdote,
of human nature.
“It is very much the same with everything else,” said F—;
“no two people see with the same eyes, physically or morally;
and faith, we might save ourselves a great deal of care and bother
if we did but keep it in mind.”
“As how?” I asked, for I saw that this vague remark was
premonitory of an illustration.
“I think I introduced young Skyring to you at a party somewhere?”
“A youth with a gay waistcoat and nothing to say? Yes.”
“Well—your observation just now reminded me of the different
estimate put by that gentleman and myself upon something,
and if I could give you any idea of my month's work in his
behalf, you would agree with me that I might have spared myself
some trouble—keeping in mind, as I said before, the difference in
optics.
“I was copying a bit of foreshortening from a picture in the
Vatican, one day, when this youth passed without observing me.
I did not immediately recollect him. He was dressed like a
figure in a tailor's window, and, with Mrs. Stark in his hand, was
hunting up the pictures marked with four notes of admiration;
and I, with a smile at the waxy dandyism of the man, turned to
my work and forgot him. Presently his face recurred to me, or
rather his sister's face, which some family likeness had insensibly
recalled, and, getting another look, I recognised in him an old,
though not very intimate playmate of my boyish days. It immediately
occurred to me that I could serve him a very good turn
by giving him the entrée to society here, and quite as immediately,
while.”
“And what changed your mind,” I asked, “for of course you
came to the conclusion that it was not?”
“Oh, for his sake alone I should have left him as he was, a
hermit in his varnished boots—for he had not an acquaintance in
the city—but Kate Skyring had given me roses when roses were
to me, each a world; and for her sake, though I was a rejected
lover, I thought better of my demurrer. Then I had a little
pique to gratify—for the Skyrings had rather given me the de
haut en bas in declining the honor of my alliance (lucky for me,
since it brought me here and made me what I am), and I was not
indisposed to show that the power to serve, to say the least, was
now on my side.”
“Two sufficient, as well as dramatic reasons for being civil to a
man.”
“Only arrived at, however, by a night's deliberation, for it
cost me some trouble of thought and memory to get back into my
chrysalis and imagine myself at all subject to people so much
below my present vogue—whatever that is worth! Of course I
don't think of Kate in this comparison, for a woman one has once
loved is below nothing. We'll drink her health, God bless
her!”
(A bottle of Lagrima.)
“I left my card on Mr. Skyring the next morning, with a note
enclosing three or four invitations which I had been at some
trouble to procure, and a hope from myself of the honor of his
company to a quiet dinner. He took it as a statue would take a
shower-bath, wrote me a note in the third person in reply to mine
in the first, and came in ball-dress and sulphur gloves at precisely
Thorwalsden dined with me, and an English viscount for whom I
was painting a picture, and between my talking Italian to the
venerable sculptor, and Skyring's belording and belordshipping
the good-natured nobleman, the dinner went trippingly off—the
Little Pedlington of our mutual nativity furnishing less than its
share to the conversation.
“We drove, all together, to the Palazzo Rossi, for it was the
night of the Marchesa's soirée. As sponsor, I looked with some
satisfaction at Skyring in the ante-room, his toggery being quite
unexceptionable, and his maintien very uppish and assured. I
presented him to our fair hostess, who surveyed him as he approached
with a satisfactory look of approval, and no one else
chancing to be near, I left him to improve what was rather a rare
opportunity—a tète-à-tète with the prettiest woman in Rome.
Five minutes after, I returned to reconnoitre, and there he stood,
stroking down his velvet waistcoat, and looking from the carpet
to the ceiling, while the marchioness was quite red with embarrassment
and vexation. He had not opened his lips! She had
tried him in French and Italian (the dunce had told me that he
spoke French too), and finally she had ventured upon English,
which she knew very little of, and still he neither spoke nor ran
away!
“`Perhaps Monsieur would like to dance,' said the marchioness,
gliding away from him with a look of inexpressible relief,
and trusting to me to find him a partner.
“I had no difficulty in finding him a partner, for (that far) his
waistcoat `put him on velvet'—but I could not trust him alone
again; so, having presented him to a very pretty woman and got
them vis-à-vis in the quadrille, I stood by to supply the short-comings.
to say; nor, confound him, had he any embarrassment on the subject.
He looked at his varnished pumps, and coaxed his coat to
his waist, and set back his neck like a goose bolting a grasshopper,
and took as much interest in the conversation as a footman behind
your chair—deaf and dumb apparently, but perfectly at his ease.
He evidently had no idea that there was any distinction between
men except in dress, and was persuaded that he was entirely successful
as far as he had gone: and, as to my efforts in his behalf,
he clearly took them as gratuitous on my part—probably thinking,
from the difference in our exteriors, that I had paid myself
in the glory of introducing him.
“Well—I had begun so liberally that I could scarce refuse to
find my friend another partner, and, after that, another and
another—I, to avoid the odium of inflicting a bore on my fair
acquaintances, feeling compelled to continue my service as chorus
in the pantomime—and, you will scarce believe me when I tell
you that I submitted to this bore nightly for a month! I could
not get rid of him. He would not be let go. Without offending
him mortally, and so undoing all my sentimental outlay for Kate
Skyring and her short-sighted papa, I had nothing for it but to
go on till he should go off—ridden to death with him in every
conceivable variety of bore.”
“And is he gone?”
“Gone. And now, what thanks do you suppose I got for all
this?”
“A present of a pencil-case?”
“No, indeed! but a lesson in human nature that will stick by
me much longer. He called at my studio yesterday morning to
say good-bye. Through all my sense of his boredom and relief at
in, thinking how difficult it would be for him to express properly
his sense of the obligation he was under to me. After half an
hour's monologue (by myself) on pictures, &c., he started up
and said he must go. `And by-the-by,' said he, coloring a little,
`there is one thing I want to say to you, Mr. F—! Hang it, it
has stuck in my throat ever since I met you! You've been very
polite and I'm obliged to you, of course—but I don't like your
devilish patronizing manner! Good-bye, Mr. F—!”
The foregoing is a leaf from a private diary which I kept at
Rome. In making a daily entry of such passing stuff as interests
us, we sometimes, amid much that should be ticketed for oblivion,
record that which has a bearing, important or amusing, on the
future; and a late renewal of my acquaintance with Mr. F—,
followed by a knowledge of some fortunate changes in his worldly
condition, has given that interest to this otherwise unimportant
scrap of diary which will be made apparent presently to the
reader. A vague recollection that I had something in an old
book which referred to him, induced me to look it up, and I was
surprised to find that I had noted down, in this trifling aneedote,
what turned out to be the mainspring of his destiny.
F— returned to his native country after five years study of
the great masters of Italy. His first pictures painted at Rome
procured for him, as is stated in the diary I have quoted, a high
reputation. He carried with him a style of his own which was
merely stimulated and heightened by his first year's walk through
the galleries of Florence, and the originality and boldness in his
manner of coloring seemed to promise a sustained novelty of the
art. Gradually, however, the awe of the great masters seemed
deepened his knowledge of painting, he threw aside feature after
feature of his own peculiar style, till at last he fell into the track
of the great army of imitators, who follow the immortals of the
Vatican as doomed ships follow the Flying Dutchman.
Arrived at home, and depending solely on his art for a subsistence,
F— commenced the profession to which he had served so
long an apprenticeship. But his pictures sadly disappointed his
friends. After the first specimens of his acquired style in the
annual exhibitions, the calls at his rooms became fewer and farther
between, and his best works were returned from the galleries
unsold. Too proud to humor the popular taste by returning to
what he considered an inferior stage of his art, he stood still with
his reputation ebbing from him, and as his means, of course,
depended on the tide of public favor, he was soon involved in
troubles before which his once-brilliant hopes rapidly faded.
At this juncture he received the following letter:—
“You will be surprised on glancing at the signature to this
letter. You will be still more surprised when you are reminded
that it is a reply to an unanswered one of your own—written
years ago. That letter lies by me, expressed with all the diffidence
of boyish feeling. And it seems as if its diffidence would
encourage me in what I wish to say. Yet I write far more
tremblingly than you could have done.
“Let me try to prepare the way by some explanation of the
past.
“You were my first lover. I was not forbidden, at fourteen,
to express the pleasure I felt at your admiration, and you cannot
have forgotten the ardor and simplicity with which I returned it.
long ago. Now—writing to you with the same feeling warm at
my heart—it seems to me as if it needed but a rose, could I give
it you in the same garden, to make us lovers again. Yet I know
you must be changed. I scarce know whether I should go on
with this letter.
“But I owe you reparation. I owe you an answer to this
which lies before me; and, if I err in answering it as my heart
burns to do, you will at least be made happier by knowing that
when treated with neglect and repulsion, you were still beloved.
“I think it was not long before the receipt of this letter that
my father first spoke to me of our attachment. Till then I had
only thought of loving you. That you were graceful and manly,
that your voice was sweet, and that your smile made me happy,
was all I could have told of you without reflection. I had never
reasoned upon your qualities of mind, though I had taken an
unconscious pride in your superiority to your companions, and
least of all had I asked myself whether those abilities for making
your way in the world, which my father denied you, were among
your boyish energies. With a silent conviction that you had no
equal among your companions, in anything, I listened to my
father's disparagement of you, bewildered and overawed—the
very novelty and unexpectedness of the light in which he spoke
of you, sealing my lips completely. Perhaps resistance to his
will would have been of no avail, but, had I been better prepared
to reason upon what he urged, I might have expressed to you
the unwillingness of my acquiescence. I was prevented from
seeing you till your letter came, and then all intercourse with
you was formally forbidden. My father said he would himself
only recovered possession of it by his death.
“Though it may seem like reproaching you for yielding me
without an effort, I must say, to complete the history of my own
feelings, that I nursed a vague hope of hearing from you until
your departure for Italy, and that this hope was extinguished not
without bitter tears. The partial resentment that mingled with
this unhappiness aided me doubtless in making up my mind to
forget you, and for a while, for years I may say, I was possessed
by other excitements and feelings. It is strange, however, that,
though scarce remembering you when waking, I still saw you
perpetually in my dreams.
“And, so far, this is a cold and easy recital. How shall I
describe to you the next change, the re-awakening of this smothered
and slumbering affection! How shall I evade your contempt
when I tell you that it awoke with your renown! But my
first feeling was not one of love. When your name began to come
to us in the letters of travellers and in the rumor of literary
circles, I felt as if something that belonged to me was praised
and honored; a pride, an exulting and gratified pride, that feeling
seemed to be, as if the heart of my childhood had been
staked on your aspirations, and was borne up with you, a part
and a partaker of your fame. With all my soul I drank in the
news of your successes in the art; I wrote to those who came
home from Italy; I questioned those likely to have heard of you,
as critics and connoisscurs; I devoted all my reading to the literature
of the arts, and the history of painters, for my life was
poured into yours irresistibly, by a power I could not, and cannot
now control. My own imagination turned painter, indeed, for I
lived on revery, calling up, with endless variations, pictures of
knew you were, yet unchanged in the graceful and boyish beauty
I remembered. I was proud of having loved you, of having been
the object of the earliest and purest preference of a creature of
genius; and through this pride, supplanting and overflowing it,
crept and strengthened a warmer feeling, the love I have the
hardihood to avow. Oh! what will you think of this boldness!
Yet to conceal my love were now a severer task than to wait the
hazard of your contempt.
“One explanation—a palliative, perhaps you will allow it to
be, if you are generous—remains to be given. The immediate
impulse of this letter was information from my brother, long
withheld, of your kindness to him in Rome. From some perverseness
which I hardly understand, he has never before hinted
in my presence that he had seen you in Italy, and it was only by
needing it as an illustration of some feeling which seemed to have
piqued him, and which he was expressing to a friend, that he
gave the particulars of your month of devotion to him. Knowing
the difference between your characters, and the entire want of
sympathy between your pursuits and my brother's, to what
motive could I attribute your unusual and self-sacrificing kindness?
“Did I err—was I presumptuous, in believing that it was
from a forgiving and tender memory of myself?
“You are prepared now, if you can be, for what I would say.
We are left alone, my brother and I, orphan heirs to the large
fortune of my father. I have no one to control my wishes, no
one's permission to ask for any disposition of my hand and fortune.
Will you have them? In this question is answered the
beside me.
Mrs. F—, as will be seen from the style of her letter, is a
woman of decision and cleverness, and of such a helpmeet, in the
way of his profession as well as in the tenderer relations of life,
F— was sorely in need. By her common-sense counsels and
persuasion, he has gone back, with his knowledge of the art, to the
first lights of his own powerful genius, and, with means to command
leisure and experiment, he is, without submitting the
process to the world, perfecting a manner which will more than
redeem his early promise.
As his career, though not very uncommon or dramatic, hinged
for its more fortunate events on an act of high-spirited politeness,
I have thought, that, in this age of departed chivalry, the story
was worth preserving for its lesson.
| People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction | |