The Seaboard Parish, Volume 2. George MacDonald
we set her down near the mouth of a cave, in the shadow of a rock. And there was our dinner nicely laid for us on a flat rock in front of the cave. The cliffs rose behind us, with curiously curved and variously angled strata. The sun in his full splendour threw dark shadows on the brilliant yellow sand, more and more of which appeared as the bright blue water withdrew itself, now rippling over it as if it meant to hide it all up again, now uncovering more as it withdrew for another rush. Before we had finished our dinner, the foremost wavelets appeared so far away over the plain of the sand, that it seemed a long walk to the edge that had been almost at our feet a little while ago. Between us and it lay a lovely desert of glittering sand.
When even Charlie and Harry had arrived at the conclusion that it was time to stop eating, we left the shadow and went out into the sun, carrying Connie and laying her down in the midst of "the ribbed sea-sand," which was very ribby to-day. On a shawl a little way off from her lay her baby, crowing and kicking with the same jollity that had possessed the boys ever since the morning. I wandered about with Wynnie on the sands, picking up amongst other things strange creatures in thin shells ending in vegetable-like tufts, if I remember rightly. My wife sat on the end of Connie's litter, and Dora and the boys, a little way off, were trying how far the full force of three wooden spades could, in digging a hole, keep ahead of the water which was ever tumbling in the sand from the sides of the same. Behind, the servants were busy washing the plates in a pool, and burying the fragments of the feast; for I made it a rule wherever we went that the fair face of nature was not to be defiled. I have always taken the part of excursionists in these latter days of running to and fro, against those who complain that the loveliest places are being destroyed by their inroads. But there is one most offensive, even disgusting habit amongst them—that of leaving bones, fragments of meat pies, and worse than all, pieces of greasy paper about the place, which I cannot excuse, or at least defend. Even the surface of Cumberland and Westmoreland lakes will be defiled with these floating abominations—not abominations at all if they are decently burned or buried when done with, but certainly abominations when left to be cast hither and thither in the wind, over the grass, or on the eddy and ripple of the pure water, for days after those who have thus left their shame behind them have returned to their shops or factories. I forgive them for trampling down the grass and the ferns. That cannot be helped, and in comparison of the good they get, is not to be considered at all. But why should they leave such a savage trail behind them as this, forgetting too that though they have done with the spot, there are others coming after them to whom these remnants must be an offence?
At length in our roaming, Wynnie and I approached a long low ridge of rock, rising towards the sea into which it ran. Crossing this, we came suddenly upon the painter whom Dora had called Niceboots, sitting with a small easel before him. We were right above him ere we knew. He had his back towards us, so that we saw at once what he was painting.
"O, papa!" cried Wynnie involuntarily, and the painter looked round.
"I beg your pardon," I said. "We came over from the other side, and did not see you before. I hope we have not disturbed you much."
"Not in the least," he answered courteously, and rose as he spoke.
I saw that the subject on his easel suggested that of which Wynnie had been making a sketch at the same time, on the day when Connie first lay on the top of the opposite cliff. But he was not even looking in the same direction now.
"Do you mind having your work seen before it is finished?"
"Not in the least, if the spectators will do me the favour to remember that most processes have to go through a seemingly chaotic stage," he answered.
I was struck with the mode and tone of the remark.
"Here is no common man," I said to myself, and responded to him in something of a similar style.
"I wish we could always keep that in mind with regard to human beings themselves, as well as their works," I said aloud.
The painter looked at me, and I looked at him.
"We speak each from the experience of his own profession, I presume," he said.
"But," I returned, glancing at the little picture in oils upon his easel, "your work here, though my knowledge of painting is next to nothing—perhaps I ought to say nothing at all—this picture must have long ago passed the chaotic stage."
"It is nearly as much finished as I care to make it," he returned. "I hardly count this work at all. I am chiefly amusing, or rather pleasing, my own fancy at present."
"Apparently," I remarked, "you had the conical rock outside the hay for your model, and now you are finishing it with your back turned towards it. How is that?"
"I will soon explain," he answered. "The moment I saw this rock, it reminded me of Dante's Purgatory."
"Ah, you are a reader of Dante?" I said. "In the original, I hope."
"Yes. A friend of mine, a brother painter, an Italian, set me going with that, and once going with Dante, nobody could well stop. I never knew what intensity per se was till I began to read Dante."
"That is quite my own feeling. Now, to return to your picture."
"Without departing at all from natural forms, I thought to make it suggest the Purgatorio to anyone who remembered the description given of the place ab extra by Ulysses, in the end of the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno. Of course, that thing there is a mere rock, yet it has certain mountain forms about it. I have put it at a much greater distance, you see, and have sought to make it look a solitary mountain in the midst of a great water. You will discover even now that the circles of the Purgatory are suggested without any approach, I think, to artificial structure; and there are occasional hints at figures, which you cannot definitely detach from the rocks—which, by the way, you must remember, were in one part full of sculptures. I have kept the mountain near enough, however, to indicate the great expanse of wild flowers on the top, which Matilda was so busy gathering. I want to indicate too the wind up there in the terrestrial paradise, ever and always blowing one way. You remember, Mr. Walton?"—for the young man, getting animated, began to talk as if we had known each other for some time—and here he repeated the purport of Dante's words in English:
"An air of sweetness, changeless in its flow,
With no more strength than in a soft wind lies,
Smote peacefully against me on the brow.
By which the leaves all trembling, level-wise,
Did every one bend thitherward to where
The high mount throws its shadow at sunrise."
"I thought you said you did not use translations?"
"I thought it possible that—Miss Walton (?)" interrogatively this—"might not follow the Italian so easily, and I feared to seem pedantic."
"She won't lag far behind, I flatter myself," I returned. "Whose translation do you quote?"
He hesitated a moment; then said carelessly:
"I have cobbled a few passages after that fashion myself."
"It has the merit of being near the original at least," I returned; "and that seems to me one of the chief merits a translation can possess."
"Then," the painter resumed, rather hastily, as if to avoid any further remark upon his verses, "you see those white things in the air above?" Here he turned to Wynnie. "Miss Walton will remember—I think she was making a drawing of the rock at the same time I was—how the seagulls, or some such birds—only two or three of them—kept flitting about the top of it?"
"I remember quite well," answered Wynnie, with a look of appeal to me.
"Yes," I interposed; "my daughter, in describing what she had been attempting to draw, spoke especially of the birds over the rock. For she said the white lapping of the waves looked like spirits trying to get loose, and the white birds like foam that had broken its chains, and risen in triumph into the air."
Here Mr. Niceboots, for as yet I did not know what else to call him, looked at Wynnie almost with a start.
"How wonderfully that falls in with my fancy about the rock!" he said.