Julian Hawthorne

“ Fortunately for Marion, in this crisis, she was able to avail herself of the consolation that the divine wisdom of music alone can afford. For great music is divine wisdom—the divine wisdom of divine love, through which we may perceive the atonement of creature with Creator. It is a language too charged with meaning and too catholic to be articulate; the hearts of myriads may find expression in it, each different from the rest. The source of man's evil and suffering is his finiteness; but man has also his infinite side ”

“ Such a man would lack human footing in the world. As the sun falls as willingly on dunghills as on roses, so he might commit or connive at crime, because it seemed to him as alluring as virtue. The brain, untutored by the heart, has led many able souls down instead of up; hell is as full of brains as heaven. Now, whether a heartless æsthetic monstrosity of this kind did good or evil in the world would depend on circumstances—on sheer accident!
Cattermole, for example, gains unlimited fortune at the moment his affections are outraged. ”

“ When Marion began to sing he altered his position slightly, until by degrees his black gaze was fixed upon her, and he leaned forward, drawing a long breath at intervals. As for Mrs. Chantrey, she seemed more moved by the effect of the singing upon Morton and Cattermole than by the singing itself. But nothing else is so nearly extinct as the soul of a woman of the world and of society who has spent her life in the sturdy sacrifice of truth, honor and generosity for the sake of social rewards. ”

“ Every true musical composition—nay, every work of genuine art of whatever kind—unveils to man the glorious vision of his own immortality, in the sweep of whose illimitable are the petty divergences and discrepancies of time are reconciled.
With the instinct of the artist, Marion, when her burden was no longer personally supportable, had fled to the protection of this mighty, impersonal friend, as another might have sought support in prayer. She prayed through her music. ”

“ Marion has auburn hair and dark brown eyes. She is reserved, and seems satisfied with herself, for which one can't blame her; but she certainly has a temperament, and this coldness might turn out to be a mere manner of self-defense. She sang for us yesterday forenoon, touching the piano very lightly with her fingertips; and I, listening to her with Cattermole's remarks in my mind, realized for the first time that that diamond chill in her voice may be only the virgin shield which she instinctively interposes between the world and the depths within her. ”

“ It was on the tip of my angry tongue to ask her whether she included her own daughter under this tolerant judgment; but what is the use of arguing with society people?
“Whatever specific acts the artist may happen to commit,” remarked the unruffled Cattermole, “he can never be charged with crime, baseness or selfishness, because his motive is always culture, which aims to create the immortal good and fair. Motive always qualifies acts; they have no intrinsic quality. Technical crimes and vices cease to be such when they have in view the deepening or elevation of the artistic faculty. ”

“ Therefore, moral opprobrium can never attach to the artist; the law of his being is not license, nor is it duty; it is spontaneity. As for your water lily, is not its purity born of the black mud of the river bottom? But all I'm driving at is, that Marion will be a greater singer—the greatest of singers, I believe—when her nature has been mellowed and enriched by experience—meaning by that word a somewhat broader and less restrained intercourse with the human side of life than is commonly deemed prudent for young unmarried women. ”

“ Art is the manifestation of a divine life in us; but the human instrument must be fully developed before the divine energy can adequately possess and use it. Art is born of a connubial intercourse between the spiritual mind and its material environment—the joys, sorrows, hopes and fears, passions and regrets, arising from association with our fellows. The artist must never submit his free limbs to the shackles of orthodoxy in life and morals. ”

“ I am allowing my fad of psychological analysis to lead me into treason to friendship. Cattermole simply does not understand the wickedness of the world; his thoughts are set on a love match for Marion and Morton and on his sanitary dwellings in the slums, and he has eyes for naught else. ”

“ Since his fortune depends upon his winning her for his wife, why should he deliberately and gratuitously damn himself by attempting her ruin? Every crime has a motive, however base the motive may be; but this crime was attempted in the teeth of the most powerful motives that could appeal to such a man—fortune and the possession of a beautiful woman. It is inconceivable, but there it stands.
Morton ought to be shot. But it is for Cattermole to deal with him. Marion would not tell him, from some chivalric feeling of reluctance to expose to him the infamy of his protégé ”

“ The artist is man as God meant all men to be; but no moralist can be an artist, or ever could produce a work of art.”
At this point my native amiability gave way.
“Upon my word, Cattermole,” I exclaimed, “I'm glad Marion is beyond earshot of your eloquence. What you say means that license is man's duty and path to heaven. Our highest faculties are to be developed by indulging our basest propensities. The debauché and the criminal are God's only perfect work, and works of art can be created only by moral degenerates. ”

“ Angel and devil come to closer grip here than in the world of spirits!
He paused for a moment under my window. “Our singing bird should come out of her cage and give us the music for this lovely accompaniment of earth and sky,” said he. “I fancy,” he added, with a significant smile, “that the ice will be melting when we hear her next!”
This remark was so untimely that I could not restrain a grim laugh. I felt tempted to say something about ice melting under the fires of tophet as well as under the sunshine of heaven, but I kept it back. What could Morton have been telling him? ”

“ After a while Morton left Cattermole and came toward the house. He walked slowly, with his eyes on the ground, cutting at the daisies as he came with semicircular sweeps of his cane. He wore his bicycle dress; and certainly he is a fine figure of a man. But as he drew near he raised his face, and I never saw a blacker look than that which it bore. What were he and Cattermole talking about? It could hardly have been about the new hygienic houses in the slums; but it is still less credible that it could have been about Marion. ”

“ Well, all the works of art I've seen bore internal evidence of victory over every self-seeking and unneighborly instinct of our nature. They were pure as water lilies, and their message, whether given through the medium of picture, statue, temple, poem or symphony, was that good and truth are supreme. What other basis can beauty have? ”

“ Cattermole did not seem disturbed, but Mrs. Chantrey, who, to do her justice, did not, I think, comprehend or care for the merits of the discussion, gathered from my stridency.that harmony was lacking somewhere, and sought to restore it by saying, tranquilly:
“Most artists I've known in society were delightful people. In society, of course, all one asks is outward conformity; if the artistic temperament, under the rose, takes an occasional airing beyond the bounds of strict propriety, we forgive it in gratitude for their art.” ”

“ So do we all, of course, between thirty and fifty; we grow older, get lines on the face, gray in the hair, a stoop in the shoulders, or a paunch, or a drag in the step. But Cattermole, from a lithe, quick, graceful, handsome youth, has become ghastly and phantasmal—I recur to that adjective. ”

“ She is perfect in every social accomplishment, so artificial as to seem natural. Interiorly, she may be black as tophet, hating the human race and craving its destruction; but what have we to do with that? In this world, angels would be impossible people in society; while a devil arrayed as an angel is just the thing. ”

“ He is something more than a flat surface and a hackneyed outline; in him are depths, heights, shadows as well as lights, ever varying contours, shifting hues, soul and substance. He absorbs his surroundings, interprets and organizes them, and vindicates their divine source by reproducing them in forms of immortal beauty. ”

“ In all her much tried and tempted career she has never been known to make a false step. What patience, temper and purpose is indicated by that! What courage, too, never to have admitted defeat, but to be still, as the pugilists say, in the ring! And now, at full fifty years of age, she hopes to win out with her daughter. The girl is certainly a beauty, and has a voice with money in it; and there is no reason why she should not capture some Russian prince with infinite riches, and then the much-enduring, deeply planning Mabel Lyell would have her reward. ”

“ Cattermole, with his apostolic simplicity, and the essential youthfulness which his selfless life has kept alive in him, full of forgiveness, too, for all human frailties, might conceivably fall into the snare. We are more apt to love those we have truly forgiven than those who forgive us. ”

“ He must admit to his soul the broadest experiences of the race. To him, poison is nourishment as well as bread, sin and pain as well as goodness and pleasure, because he does not recognize the conventional verdict upon these elements of experience, but perceives all of them alike to be necessary ingredients in the grand diapason of mortal existence. ”

“ Chantrey never looked better, or seemed more disposed to be agreeable. I don't approve of this lady, but that does not prevent me from greatly enjoying her society. She is much more charming than a sincere or conscientious person could be, and she is full of really interesting conversation. She meets your eye with a congenial, understanding, inviting look, as much as to say, “You're delightful, you're clever, you know what's what—and there's a pair of us!”—which is engagingly flattering. Her life has been a fight from the start, and not a successful one ”

“ We elders had argued and wrangled across the dinner table just now, and had but darkened counsel. Perfect beauty, while we are under its influence, solves riddles and removes mountains, though it is true that we cannot maintain of ourselves the heights to which it lifts us. ”

“ I have fallen into the habit of getting up before breakfast and taking a walk of half a mile through the woods to a delightful little cataract which the brook makes by tumbling down a rocky declivity some thirty feet in height. ”

“ Practically, there might be a difference; good deeds may reflect some benefit on the doer, even though he does them mechanically. But the point is that, being guided by no true religious principle, he may at any moment exchange benevolence for crime, without being himself conscious of the change. All he seeks being gratification, why should he avoid one means of attaining it more than another? ”

“ Since her mother is not a woman to do anything without an object, I also wonder what she is here for; and it has occurred to me that possibly she may contemplate the desperate enterprise of capturing Cattermole! She is a handsome widow, looking much less than her age, and skilful in every feminine resource ”

“ His refined and civilized intelligence casts about for relief from the preoccupation of pain, and happens to picture to itself the charms of altruism. He can feed the starving, clothe the naked and play the part of Providence. Native originality leads him to eschew the beaten paths of charity ”

“ His face, as he smiled up at me, had a really seraphic look. I was almost irritated by it, considering how sinister were the conditions surrounding him. I have read somewhere that angels occasionally visit hell; they would be in peril of destruction there were it not for the protection afforded them by their own paradisaical atmosphere, which surrounds them, and which no devil can approach or breathe without suffering torments. In some such angelic way Cattermole seems to move about this earth ”

“ Among other things there was a forgery of my name for several thousand pounds, which could have been done by no other than by him. I confronted him with the evidence, and he could make no effective defense. I would have given a hundred times the money to have proved him innocent. ”

“ I am by no means a harsh judge of human frailty; in my opinion, sin is an important and interesting element in life, and not without its amiable side. We can't get rid of it, and, if we are wise, we shall cease some time to persecute it as we do. It is the persecution that does most of the mischief. It necessitates hypocrisy, which is, after all, the least palatable of our evils. But no matter now! Yes, Miss Chantrey, I did have an understanding with Mr. ”