The Portrait - Page 2

in the darkest
corner of an opera-box. But look at his pictures of really great people--
how great _they_ are! There's plenty of ideal there. Take his Professor
Clyde; how clearly the man's history is written in those broad steady
strokes of the brush: the hard work, the endless patience, the fearless
imagination of the great _savant_! Or the picture of Mr. Domfrey--the man
who has felt beauty without having the power to create it. The very brush-
work expresses the difference between the two; the crowding of nervous
tentative lines, the subtler gradations of color, somehow convey a
suggestion of dilettantism. You feel what a delicate instrument the man
is, how every sense has been tuned to the finest responsiveness." Mrs.
Mellish paused, blushing a little at the echo of her own eloquence. "My
advice is, don't let George Lillo paint you if you don't want to be found
out--or to find yourself out. That's why I've never let him do _me_; I'm
waiting for the day of judgment," she ended with a laugh.

Every one but the pretty woman, whose eyes betrayed a quivering impatience
to discuss clothes, had listened attentively to Mrs. Mellish. Lillo's
presence in New York--he had come over from Paris for the first time in
twelve years, to arrange the exhibition of his pictures--gave to the
analysis of his methods as personal a flavor as though one had been
furtively dissecting his domestic relations. The analogy, indeed, is not
unapt; for in Lillo's curiously detached existence it is difficult to
figure any closer tie than that which unites him to his pictures. In this
light, Mrs. Mellish's flushed harangue seemed not unfitted to the
trivialities of the tea hour, and some one almost at once carried on the
argument by saying:--"But according to your theory--that the significance
of his work depends on the significance of the sitter--his portrait of
Vard ought to be a master-piece; and it's his biggest failure."

Alonzo Vard's suicide--he killed himself, strangely enough, the day that
Lillo's pictures were first shown--had made his portrait the chief feature
of the exhibition. It had been painted ten or twelve years earlier, when
the terrible "Boss" was at the height of his power; and if ever man
presented a type to stimulate such insight as Lillo's, that man was Vard;
yet the portrait was a failure. It was magnificently composed; the
technique was dazzling; but the face had been--well, expurgated. It was
Vard as Cumberton might have painted him--a common man trying to look at
ease in a good coat. The picture had never before been exhibited, and
there was a general outcry of disappointment. It wasn't only the critics
and the artists who grumbled. Even the big public, which had gaped and