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Updated: June 12, 2025
The temptation was irresistible. Robert accepted the invitation, and as he watched the play, it seemed to him that he had never known Brigit till that evening. He had seen her in dreams yes; and talked to her in dreams, yes; but now at last she lived a real creature. Lost in the part, she was able to throw aside the self-restraint which had given her always a cold, almost sexless quality. Her face betrayed a hundred changing emotions: the youth, strength, and passion so severely repressed in her own life came out, though still controlled, with full and perfect harmony in her art. It was one of those consummate revelations of temperament which, in silent or inactive lives, never come till the last hours before death when in one look or one utterance all the time lost and all the long-concealed feelings take their reparation from existence. But with those who may express their true characters through the medium of some creative faculty, the illuminated moment comes at a psychic crisis not to enforce the irony of death but to demonstrate and intensify the richness of humanity. The knowledge which depends upon suffering, and, in a way, springs from it, is good, yet it must always be incomplete. Happiness has its light also, and in order to get the right explanation of any soul, or to understand the eternal meaning of any situation, one must have had at least a few glad hours, felt the ecstasy of thoughtless joy, drifted a little while with the rushing, unhindered tide. As Robert, behind the grille, watched the animated, beautiful girl who seemed to typify the very springtime of the world, he felt he had peered too long at love and life through bars. He would have to break them, get on the other side, and join in the dazzling action. How unreal and far-away seemed all grief, remorse, or anxiety from that brilliant scene! Brigit was laughing, singing, dancing fulfilling, surely enough, her real vocation. What! at seventeen, was she to sit pale, silent, tearful, and alone? At his age, was he to look on with a dead heart and unseeing eyes, murmuring words of tame submission to a contemptuous Fate? His whole nature rose up in revolt, and the self he had once abdicated rushed back to him, howling out taunts which were not the less bitter because they were false. Not pausing to wonder whether the present were a profanation of the past, or the past an insipid forecast of the present, he was conscious only that a change perhaps a terrible change had taken place in his mind a change so sudden and so violent that it had paralysed every power of analysis and reflection. Imaginative love made up of renunciation and spirituality, gave way to the fierce desire to live, to silence the intolerable wisdom of the conscience, and learn folly for a space. He was madly jealous of Castrillon, who gazed into Brigit's eyes and uttered his lines with the most touching air of passionate devotion. She seemed to respond, and, in fact, their joint performance had that delicate, irresistible abandon apparently unconscious and unpremeditated which is only possible between two players who are not in love with each other. Where there is actual feeling, there is always a certain awkwardness and want of conviction (partly caused by the inadequacy of the diagram in comparison with the reality), and the charm, so far as art is concerned, is wholly lost. An acted love was the only love possible between Brigit and Castrillon; hence its sincerity on the stage, where, as a merely assumed thing, it harmonised perfectly with its artificial surroundings the canvas landscape, the painted trees, the mechanical birds, and the sunlight produced by tricks of gauze and gas. But Orange did not stop to consider this. It was enough and too much to see his "sad spirit of the elfin race" completely transformed. Was this the child-like, immature being of their strange visit to Miraflores? That whole episode seemed a kind of phantasy a Midsummer Night's music nothing more, perhaps something less. The very title of the play The Second Surprise of Love carried a mocking significance. Sometimes the soul speaks first, sometimes the senses first influence a life, but the turn, soon or late, must inevitably come for each, and the man or woman, sick of materialism, who begins to suspect that the unseen world and its beauty is an inheritance more lasting and more to be desired than all the vindictive joys of this prison-house, has no such bitterness as the idealist who finds himself brought into thrilling touch with the physical loveliness, the actual enchantment, the undeniable delight of certain things in life. The questions, "What have I missed? What have I lost? What birthright have I renounced?" are bound to make themselves heard. They beat upon the heart like hail upon the sand and fall buried in the scars they cause. Things of the flesh may and do become dead sea fruit; but things of the spirit often become stale and meaningless also. What is more weary than a tired mind? What joys and labours are more exhausting than those of the intellect, and the intellect only? Does an idle week in summer ever beget more lassitude or such disgust of life as a month alone with books in a library? Dissatisfaction and satiety, melancholy and fatigue show as plainly in the pages of
In front of the great doorway a dismal row of newspaper sellers standing clear of the pavement dealt out their wares from the gutter. It was a raw, gloomy day of the early spring; and the grimy sky, the mud of the streets, the rags of the dirty men, harmonised excellently with the eruption of the damp, rubbishy sheets of paper soiled with printers’ ink.
At last we beheld, with wonder and delight, the pride of the West Indies, the Cabbage Palms Palmistes of the French settlers which botanists have well named Oreodoxa, the 'glory of the mountains. We saw them afterwards a hundred times in their own native forests; and when they rose through tangled masses of richest vegetation, mixed with other and smaller species of palms, their form, fantastic though it was, harmonised well with hundreds of forms equally fantastic.
Nature, in fact, seemed to have wakened from her long nap, and was beginning to think of getting up. Like people, however, who venture to delay so long as to think about it, Nature frequently turns round and goes to sleep again in her icy cradle for a few weeks after the first awakening. The scene in the courtyard of Fort Garry harmonised with the cheerful spirit of the morning.
Her hair was snow-white, and her face extremely pale. Her lips were bloodless, and even her eyes were of such a light tinge of blue that they hardly relieved the general pallor. Her dress was a grey silk, which harmonised with her general appearance. She had a peculiar expression of countenance, which I was unable at the moment to refer to its proper cause.
The owner of this extraordinary vocal organ was a big, fat, florid-faced individual with a dark, bluish-red complexion. He wore a flaring diamond ring around a glaring red necktie; and a loud checked suit that matched his voice perfectly. In fact, his whole make-up harmonised remarkably with the unearthly noise that issued from his throat.
True, there may seem a strange contrast between the present condition of the Lord who 'was received up into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, and that of the servants wandering through the world on His business; but the contrast is harmonised by the next words, 'the Lord also working with them. Yes, He has gone up to sit at the right hand of God.
Her mother was not a woman to bestow mental culture upon her only child, but she racked her small brain to devise becoming costumes for Violet: the coloured stockings which harmonised best with each particular gown, the neat little buckled shoes, the fascinating Hessian boots. Nothing was too beautiful or too costly for Violet.
She gazed up at the weave of leaves and blossoms, then down at the wavering carpet of their shadows. "It is lovely here," she said. The young man looked at the slender young creature in the blue gown and smiled with utter content. "It is very odd," he said, "but nothing except blue and that particular shade of blue would have harmonised." "I should have said green or pink."
But to express the sober truth of those impressions which remain when the first astonishment of the Venetian revelation has subsided, when the spirit of the place has been harmonised through familiarity with our habitual mood, is difficult. Venice inspires at first an almost Corybantic rapture.
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