Just see how they marry! A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd, fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man--such as he is--out of it.I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.
--A child,--yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child! Do you know how Art brings all ages together? There is no age to the angels and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he shares their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim.
The youthful painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a brother, and the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to which his own is of patriarchal antiquity.
But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain.Pity, Isuppose.They say that leads to love.
--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were drifting.I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think Ican look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent feebleness of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very hard to cheat, is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine, knowing that all is in readiness and the slow-match burning quietly down to the powder.He will leave it by-and-by, and then it will take care of itself.
One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a house and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the building is on fire.Hark! There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive, crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is tolerably intelligible.There is a whiff of something floating about, suggestive of toasting shingles.Also a sharp pyroligneous-acid pungency in the air that stings one's eyes.Let us get up and see what is going on.--Oh,--oh,--oh! do you know what has got hold of you? It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, and his thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes glaring at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues lapping the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber sweat that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap.Run for your life! leap! or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing but a coroner would take for the wreck of a human being!
If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away comparison, I shall be much obliged to him.All I intended to say was, that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know that they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among them.I don't pretend to say or know what it is that brings these two persons together;--and when I say together, I only mean that there is an evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their commonest intercourse strangely significant, as that each seems to understand a look or a word of the other.When the young girl laid her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly shocked the Model, you may remember,--I saw that she had learned the lion-tamer's secret.She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster that he makes a baby of.
One of two things must happen.The first is love, downright love, on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man.
You may laugh, if you like.But women are apt to love the men who they think have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and disappointment? What would become of him, if this fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her burning image?
--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course.I should think the chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than she to marry him.
There is one other thing that might happen.If the interest he awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other.
All excitements run to love in women of a certain--let us not say age, but youth.An electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it.So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her.I should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south,--as she would, if the love-currents are like those of the earth our mother.
Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"?
This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the hooting of the owls, who would answer him"with quivering peals, And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled."When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint itself with new force upon his perceptions.--Read the sonnet, if you please;--it is Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true meta-physically, but immensely suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster.