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It is like classing Walter Pater with art critics. But as Vermeer had to express himself in some form, it is perhaps fortunate that the school had developed this kind of poetic portraiture, under Terburg, Metsu and others, to a point where a genius like Vermeer could use it as the vehicle of his fascinating self-revelations.
Even if the self-reproaches were uttered in his own person, we have many other instances of saints who have blamed themselves passionately for what ordinary men would consider slight transgressions. Of all the Epistles, the Second to the Corinthians is the one which contains the most intimate self-revelations, and few can read it without loving as well as honouring its author.
Tancred had no experience of such self-revelations; such a jumble of sublime aspirations and equivocal conduct; such a total disregard of means, such complicated plots, such a fertility of perplexed and tenebrous intrigue! The animated manner and the picturesque phrase, too, in which all this was communicated, heightened the interest and effect.
The latter days of Reuben's stay beside the banks of the Perdu were filled up by a few events like these, by the dreams which these evoked, and above all by the growing realization of his love for Celia. At length the boy and girl slipped unawares into mutual self-revelations; and for a day or two life seemed so materially and tangibly joyous that vision and dream eluded them.
The effect produced upon her imagination by what she had seen, her silent wandering through the sad beauty of the wronged place, led by the man who tried stiffly to bear himself as a servant, his unintended self-revelations, her clear, well-argued point of view charmed him. She had seen the thing set apart from its county scandal, and so had read possibilities others had been blind to.
Fortunately, Dennis assembled himself, so to speak, and realized his psychological moment. "Shure," he said as he became aware of his involuntary self-revelations, "'shure, an' you would know that I am glad to see you if I was deaf and dumb." The widow laughed heartily at this, as she replied: "I'm afraid that you have kissed the blarney stone, Mr. Muldoon."
She walked home rapidly, swept by half-formulated impulses that stirred her to almost adolescent self-revelations, yet when she reached her apartment she was quite calm, almost too calm, and outwardly cold. That night over the black coffee Fred Starratt said to his wife, with an air of restrained triumph: "Well, I landed the insurance on Hilmer's car to-day."
This tender intimacy of night the natural intimacy of husband and wife; this sense, which would not be denied, however sternly he might hold it in check, of her dear form beside him; the little refinements and self-revelations of a woman's room; his half-rights towards her, appealing at once to love, and to the memory of that solemn pledge by which he had won her what man who deserved the name but must be conscious, tempestuously conscious, of such thoughts and facts?
As a further illustration of what has just been said of the self-revelations to be looked for in verse, and in Emerson's verse more especially, let the reader observe how freely he talks about his bodily presence and infirmities in his poetry, subjects he never referred to in prose, except incidentally, in private letters.
Conny had said once, hearing Margaret rail like this: "She ought to make a better bluff, or get out, not guy old Larry like that; it isn't decent, embarrasses one so. You can't guy him, too."... But Falkner understood how the acid of her daily life eating into her had touched, at these times, a sensitive nerve and compelled such self-revelations.
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