“But would you forbid them to paint passion?”

“Not in its place; when the picture gives the causes of the passion, and the scene tells its own story.  But then let us not have merely Kean as Hamlet, but Hamlet’s self; let the painter sit down and conceive for himself a Hamlet, such as Shakspeare conceived; not merely give us as much of him as could be pressed at a given moment into the face of Mr. Kean.  He will be only unjust to both actor and character.  If Flake paints Marie as Lady Macbeth, he will give us neither her nor Lady Macbeth; but only the single point at which their two characters can coincide.”

“How rude!” said Sabina, laughing; “what is he doing but hinting that La Signora’s conception of Lady Macbeth is a very partial and imperfect one?”

“And why should it not be?” asked the actress, humbly enough.

“I meant,” he answered warmly, “that there was more, far more in her than in any character which she assumes; and I do not want a painter to copy only one aspect, and let a part go down to posterity as a representation of the whole.”

“If you mean that, you shall be forgiven.  No; when she is painted, she shall be painted as herself, as she is now.  Claude shall paint her.”

“I have not known La Signora long enough,” said Claude, “to aspire to such an honour.  I paint no face which I have not studied for a year.”

“Faith!” said Scoutbush, “you would find no more in most faces at the year’s end, than you did the first day.”

“Then I would not paint them.  If I paint a portrait, which I seldom do, I wish to make it such a one as the old masters aimed at,—­to give the sum total of the whole character; traces of every emotion, if it were possible, and glances of every expression which have passed over it since it was born into the world.  They are all here, the whole past and future of the man; and every man, as the Mohammedans say, carries his destiny on his forehead.”

“But who has eyes to see it?”

“The old masters had; some of them at least.  Raphael had; Sebastian del Piombo had; and Titian, and Giorgione.  There are portraits painted by them which carry a whole life-history concentrated into one moment.”

“But they,” said Stangrave, “are the portraits of men such as they saw around them; natures who were strong for good and evil, who were not ashamed to show their strength.  Where will a painter find such among the poor, thin, unable mortals who come to him to buy immortality at a hundred and fifty guineas apiece, after having spent their lives in religiously rubbing off their angles against each other, and forming their characters, as you form shot, by shaking them together in a bag till they have polished each other into dullest uniformity?”

“It’s very true,” said Scoutbush, who suffered much at times from a certain wild Irish vein, which stirred him up to kick over the traces.  “People are horribly like each other; and if a poor fellow is bored, and tries to do anything spicy or original, he has half-a-dozen people pooh-poohing him down on the score of bad taste.”