him by the throat, and charge him with being, in some fell way,
connected with the Primrose blood. He looked up at the rain, and
then - oh Heaven! - he became Saint John. He folded his arms,
resigning himself to the weather, and I was frantically inclined to
address him as the Spectator, and firmly demand to know what he had
done with Sir Roger de Coverley.
The frightful suspicion that I was becoming deranged, returned upon
me with redoubled force. Meantime, this awful stranger,
inexplicably linked to my distress, stood drying himself at the
funnel; and ever, as the steam rose from his clothes, diffusing a
mist around him, I saw through the ghostly medium all the people I
have mentioned, and a score more, sacred and profane.
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I am conscious of a dreadful inclination that stole upon me, as it
thundered and lightened, to grapple with this man, or demon, and
plunge him over the side. But, I constrained myself - I know not
how - to speak to him, and in a pause of the storm, I crossed the
deck, and said:
'What are you?'
He replied, hoarsely, 'A Model.'
'A what?' said I.
'A Model,' he replied. 'I sets to the profession for a bob ahour.'
(All through this narrative I give his own words, which are
indelibly imprinted on my memory.)
The relief which this disclosure gave me, the exquisite delight of
the restoration of my confidence in my own sanity, I cannot
describe. I should have fallen on his neck, but for the
consciousness of being observed by the man at the wheel.
'You then,' said I, shaking him so warmly by the hand, that I wrung
the rain out of his coat-cuff, 'are the gentleman whom I have so
frequently contemplated, in connection with a high-backed chair
with a red cushion, and a table with twisted legs.'
'I am that Model,' he rejoined moodily, 'and I wish I was anything
else.'
'Say not so,' I returned. 'I have seen you in the society of many
beautiful young women;' as in truth I had, and always (I now
remember) in the act of making the most of his legs.
'No doubt,' said he. 'And you've seen me along with warses of
flowers, and any number of table-kivers, and antique cabinets, and
warious gammon.'
'Sir?' said I.
'And warious gammon,' he repeated, in a louder voice. 'You might
have seen me in armour, too, if you had looked sharp. Blessed if I
ha'n't stood in half the suits of armour as ever came out of
Pratt's shop: and sat, for weeks together, a-eating nothing, out of
half the gold and silver dishes as has ever been lent for the
purpose out of Storrses, and Mortimerses, or Garrardses, and
Davenportseseses.'
Excited, as it appeared, by a sense of injury, I thought he would
never have found an end for the last word. But, at length it
rolled sullenly away with the thunder.
'Pardon me,' said I, 'you are a well-favoured, well-made man, and
yet - forgive me - I find, on examining my mind, that I associate
you with - that my recollection indistinctly makes you, in short -
excuse me - a kind of powerful monster.'
'It would be a wonder if it didn't,' he said. 'Do you know what my
points are?'
'No,' said I.
'My throat and my legs,' said he. 'When I don't set for a head, I
mostly sets for a throat and a pair of legs. Now, granted you was
a painter, and was to work at my throat for a week together, I
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suppose you'd see a lot of lumps and bumps there, that would never
be there at all, if you looked at me, complete, instead of only my
throat. Wouldn't you?'
'Probably,' said I, surveying him.
'Why, it stands to reason,' said the Model. 'Work another week at
my legs, and it'll be the same thing. You'll make 'em out as
knotty and as knobby, at last, as if they was the trunks of two old
trees. Then, take and stick my legs and throat on to another man's
body, and you'll make a reg'lar monster. And that's the way the
public gets their reg'lar monsters, every first Monday in May, when
the Royal Academy Exhibition opens.'
'You are a critic,' said I, with an air of deference.
'I'm in an uncommon ill humour, if that's it,' rejoined the Model,
with great indignation. 'As if it warn't bad enough for a bob ahour,
for a man to be mixing himself up with that there jolly old
furniter that one 'ud think the public know'd the wery nails in by
this time - or to be putting on greasy old 'ats and cloaks, and
playing tambourines in the Bay o' Naples, with Wesuvius a smokin'
according to pattern in the background, and the wines a bearing
wonderful in the middle distance - or to be unpolitely kicking up
his legs among a lot o' gals, with no reason whatever in his mind
but to show 'em - as if this warn't bad enough, I'm to go and be
thrown out of employment too!'
'Surely no!' said I.
'Surely yes,' said the indignant Model. 'BUT I'LL GROW ONE.'
The gloomy and threatening manner in which he muttered the last
words, can never be effaced from my remembrance. My blood ran
cold.
I asked of myself, what was it that this desperate Being was
resolved to grow. My breast made no response.
I ventured to implore him to explain his meaning. With a scornful
laugh, he uttered this dark prophecy:
'I'LL GROW ONE. AND, MARK MY WORDS, IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!'
We parted in the storm, after I had forced half-a-crown on his
acceptance, with a trembling hand. I conclude that something
supernatural happened to the steamboat, as it bore his reeking
figure down the river; but it never got into the papers.
Two years elapsed, during which I followed my profession without
any vicissitudes; never holding so much as a motion, of course. At
the expiration of that period, I found myself making my way home to
the Temple, one night, in precisely such another storm of thunder
and lightning as that by which I had been overtaken on board the
steamboat - except that this storm, bursting over the town at
midnight, was rendered much more awful by the darkness and the
hour.
As I turned into my court, I really thought a thunderbolt would
fall, and plough the pavement up. Every brick and stone in the
place seemed to have an echo of its own for the thunder. The
waterspouts were overcharged, and the rain came tearing down from
the house-tops as if they had been mountain-tops.
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Mrs. Parkins, my laundress - wife of Parkins the porter, then newly
dead of a dropsy - had particular instructions to place a bedroom
candle and a match under the staircase lamp on my landing, in order
that I might light my candle there, whenever I came home. Mrs.
Parkins invariably disregarding all instructions, they were never
there. Thus it happened that on this occasion I groped my way into
my sitting-room to find the candl
e, and came out to light it.
What were my emotions when, underneath the staircase lamp, shining
with wet as if he had never been dry since our last meeting, stood
the mysterious Being whom I had encountered on the steamboat in a
thunderstorm, two years before! His prediction rushed upon my
mind, and I turned faint.
'I said I'd do it,' he observed, in a hollow voice, 'and I have
done it. May I come in?'
'Misguided creature, what have you done?' I returned.
'I'll let you know,' was his reply, 'if you'll let me in.'
Could it be murder that he had done? And had he been so successful
that he wanted to do it again, at my expense?
I hesitated.
'May I come in?' said he.
I inclined my head, with as much presence of mind as I could
command, and he followed me into my chambers. There, I saw that
the lower part of his face was tied up, in what is commonly called
a Belcher handkerchief. He slowly removed this bandage, and
exposed to view a long dark beard, curling over his upper lip,
twisting about the corners of his mouth, and hanging down upon his
breast.
'What is this?' I exclaimed involuntarily, 'and what have you
become?'
'I am the Ghost of Art!' said he.
The effect of these words, slowly uttered in the thunder-storm at
midnight, was appalling in the last degree. More dead than alive,
I surveyed him in silence.
'The German taste came up,' said he, 'and threw me out of bread. I
am ready for the taste now.'
He made his beard a little jagged with his hands, folded his arms,
and said,
'Severity!'
I shuddered. It was so severe.
He made his beard flowing on his breast, and, leaning both hands on
the staff of a carpet-broom which Mrs. Parkins had left among my
books, said:
'Benevolence.'
I stood transfixed. The change of sentiment was entirely in the
beard. The man might have left his face alone, or had no face.
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The beard did everything.
He lay down, on his back, on my table, and with that action of his
head threw up his beard at the chin.
'That's death!' said he.
He got off my table and, looking up at the ceiling, cocked his
beard a little awry; at the same time making it stick out before
him.
'Adoration, or a vow of vengeance,' he observed.
He turned his profile to me, making his upper lip very bulky with
the upper part of his beard.
'Romantic character,' said he.
He looked sideways out of his beard, as if it were an ivy-bush.
'Jealousy,' said he. He gave it an ingenious twist in the air, and
informed me that he was carousing. He made it shaggy with his
fingers - and it was Despair; lank - and it was avarice: tossed it
all kinds of ways - and it was rage. The beard did everything.
'I am the Ghost of Art,' said he. 'Two bob a-day now, and more
when it's longer! Hair's the true expression. There is no other.
I SAID I'D GROW IT, AND I'VE GROWN IT, AND IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!'
He may have tumbled down-stairs in the dark, but he never walked
down or ran down. I looked over the banisters, and I was alone
with the thunder.
Need I add more of my terrific fate? IT HAS haunted me ever since.
It glares upon me from the walls of the Royal Academy, (except when
MACLISE subdues it to his genius,) it fills my soul with terror at
the British Institution, it lures young artists on to their
destruction. Go where I will, the Ghost of Art, eternally working
the passions in hair, and expressing everything by beard, pursues
me. The prediction is accomplished, and the victim has no rest.
OUT OF TOWN
SITTING, on a bright September morning, among my books and papers
at my open window on the cliff overhanging the sea-beach, I have
the sky and ocean framed before me like a beautiful picture. A
beautiful picture, but with such movement in it, such changes of
light upon the sails of ships and wake of steamboats, such dazzling
gleams of silver far out at sea, such fresh touches on the crisp
wave-tops as they break and roll towards me - a picture with such
music in the billowy rush upon the shingle, the blowing of morning
wind through the corn-sheaves where the farmers' waggons are busy,
the singing of the larks, and the distant voices of children at
play - such charms of sight and sound as all the Galleries on earth
can but poorly suggest.
So dreamy is the murmur of the sea below my window, that I may have
been here, for anything I know, one hundred years. Not that I have
grown old, for, daily on the neighbouring downs and grassy hillsides,
I find that I can still in reason walk any distance, jump
over anything, and climb up anywhere; but, that the sound of the
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ocean seems to have become so customary to my musings, and other
realities seem so to have gone aboard ship and floated away over
the enchanted son of the King my father, shut up in a tower on the
sea-shore, for protection against an old she-goblin who insisted on
being my godmother, and who foresaw at the font - wonderful
creature! - that I should get into a scrape before I was twentyone.
I remember to have been in a City (my Royal parent's
dominions, I suppose), and apparently not long ago either, that was
in the dreariest condition. The principal inhabitants had all been
changed into old newspapers, and in that form were preserving their
window-blinds from dust, and wrapping all their smaller household
gods in curl-papers. I walked through gloomy streets where every
house was shut up and newspapered, and where my solitary footsteps
echoed on the deserted pavements. In the public rides there were
no carriages, no horses, no animated existence, but a few sleepy
policemen, and a few adventurous boys taking advantage of the
devastation to swarm up the lamp-posts. In the Westward streets
there was no traffic; in the Westward shops, no business. The
water-patterns which the 'Prentices had trickled out on the
pavements early in the morning, remained uneffaced by human feet.
At the corners of mews, Cochin-China fowls stalked gaunt and
savage; nobody being left in the deserted city (as it appeared to
me), to feed them. Public Houses, where splendid footmen swinging
their legs over gorgeous hammer-cloths beside wigged coachmen were
wont to regale, were silent, and the unused pewter pots shone, too
bright for business, on the shelves. I beheld a Punch's Show
leaning against a wall near Park Lane, as if it had fainted. It
was deserted, and there were none to heed its desolation. In
Belgrave Square I met the last man - an ostler - sitting on a post
in a ragged red waistcoat, eating straw, and mildewing away.
If I recollect the name of the little town, on whose shore this sea
is murmuring - but I am not
just now, as I have premised, to be
relied upon for anything - it is Pavilionstone. Within a quarter
of a century, it was a little fishing town, and they do say, that
the time was, when it was a little smuggling town. I have heard
that it was rather famous in the hollands and brandy way, and that
coevally with that reputation the lamplighter's was considered a
bad life at the Assurance Offices. It was observed that if he were
not particular about lighting up, he lived in peace; but that, if
he made the best of the oil-lamps in the steep and narrow streets,
he usually fell over the cliff at an early age. Now, gas and
electricity run to the very water's edge, and the South-Eastern
Railway Company screech at us in the dead of night.
But, the old little fishing and smuggling town remains, and is so
tempting a place for the latter purpose, that I think of going out
some night next week, in a fur cap and a pair of petticoat
trousers, and running an empty tub, as a kind of archaeological
pursuit. Let nobody with corns come to Pavilionstone, for there
are breakneck flights of ragged steps, connecting the principal
streets by back-ways, which will cripple that visitor in half an
hour. These are the ways by which, when I run that tub, I shall
escape. I shall make a Thermopylae of the corner of one of them,
defend it with my cutlass against the coast-guard until my brave
companions have sheered off, then dive into the darkness, and
regain my Susan's arms. In connection with these breakneck steps I
observe some wooden cottages, with tumble-down out-houses, and
back-yards three feet square, adorned with garlands of dried fish,
in one of which (though the General Board of Health might object)
my Susan dwells.
The South-Eastern Company have brought Pavilionstone into such
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vogue, with their tidal trains and splendid steam-packets, that a
new Pavilionstone is rising up. I am, myself, of New
Pavilionstone. We are a little mortary and limey at present, but
we are getting on capitally. Indeed, we were getting on so fast,
at one time, that we rather overdid it, and built a street of
shops, the business of which may be expected to arrive in about ten
years. We are sensibly laid out in general; and with a little care
and pains (by no means wanting, so far), shall become a very pretty