The Magic Skin

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A plump-faced young shopman with red hair, in an otter-skin cap, left
an old peasant woman in charge of the shop--a sort of feminine
Caliban, employed in cleaning a stove made marvelous by Bernard
Palissy's work. This youth remarked carelessly:

"Look round, _monsieur_! We have nothing very remarkable here
downstairs; but if I may trouble you to go up to the first floor, I
will show you some very fine mummies from Cairo, some inlaid pottery,
and some carved ebony--_genuine Renaissance_ work, just come in, and
of perfect beauty."

In the stranger's fearful position this cicerone's prattle and
shopman's empty talk seemed like the petty vexations by which narrow
minds destroy a man of genius. But as he must even go through with it,
he appeared to listen to his guide, answering him by gestures or
monosyllables; but imperceptibly he arrogated the privilege of saying
nothing, and gave himself up without hindrance to his closing
meditations, which were appalling. He had a poet's temperament, his
mind had entered by chance on a vast field; and he must see perforce
the dry bones of twenty future worlds.

At a first glance the place presented a confused picture in which
every achievement, human and divine, was mingled. Crocodiles, monkeys,
and serpents stuffed with straw grinned at glass from church windows,
seemed to wish to bite sculptured heads, to chase lacquered work, or
to scramble up chandeliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon's portrait
by Mme. Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The
beginnings of the world and the events of yesterday were mingled with
grotesque cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a
republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. Mme. du Barry, with a star
above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look
longingly out of Latour's pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried
to guess the purpose of the spiral curves that wound towards her.
Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons
had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life;
porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from china, old
salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to feudal times. A carved ivory
ship sped full sail on the back of a motionless tortoise.

The Emperor Augustus remained unmoved and imperial with an air-pump
thrust into one eye. Portraits of French sheriffs and Dutch
burgomasters, phlegmatic now as when in life, looked down pallid and
unconcerned on the chaos of past ages below them.

Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of
its learning, some example of its art. Nothing seemed lacking to this
philosophical kitchen-midden, from a redskin's calumet, a green and
golden slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol,
to the soldier's tobacco pouch, to the priest's ciborium, and the
plumes that once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was
rendered yet more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a multitude
of confused reflections of various hues, by the sharp contrast of
blacks and whites. Broken cries seemed to reach the ear, unfinished
dramas seized upon the imagination, smothered lights caught the eye. A
thin coating of inevitable dust covered all the multitudinous corners
and convolutions of these objects of various shapes which gave highly
picturesque effects.

First of all, the stranger compared the three galleries which
civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, dominions, carousals,
sanity, and madness had filled to repletion, to a mirror with numerous
facets, each depicting a world. After this first hazy idea he would
fain have selected his pleasures; but by dint of using his eyes,
thinking and musing, a fever began to possess him, caused perhaps by
the gnawing pain of hunger. The spectacle of so much existence,
individual or national, to which these pledges bore witness, ended by
numbing his senses--the purpose with which he entered the shop was
fulfilled. He had left the real behind, and had climbed gradually up
to an ideal world; he had attained to the enchanted palace of ecstasy,
whence the universe appeared to him by fragments and in shapes of
flame, as once the future blazed out before the eyes of St. John in
Patmos.

A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark and
luminous, far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, in whole
generations. Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose from her sands in the
form of a mummy swathed in black bandages; then the Pharaohs swallowed
up nations, that they might build themselves a tomb; and he beheld
Moses and the Hebrews and the desert, and a solemn antique world.
Fresh and joyous, a marble statue spoke to him from a twisted column
of the pleasure-loving myths of Greece and Ionia. Ah! who would not
have smiled with him to see, against the earthen red background, the
brown-faced maiden dancing with gleeful reverence before the god
Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase? The Latin queen
caressed her chimera.

The whims of Imperial Rome were there in life, the bath was disclosed,
the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, waiting for her Tibullus.
Strong with the might of Arabic spells, the head of Cicero evoked
memories of a free Rome, and unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus
Livius. The young man beheld _Senatus Populusque Romanus_; consuls,
lictors, togas with purple fringes; the fighting in the Forum, the
angry people, passed in review before him like the cloudy faces of a
dream.

Then Christian Rome predominated in his vision. A painter had laid
heaven open; he beheld the Virgin Mary wrapped in a golden cloud among
the angels, shining more brightly than the sun, receiving the prayers
of sufferers, on whom this second Eve Regenerate smiles pityingly. At
the touch of a mosaic, made of various lavas from Vesuvius and Etna,
his fancy fled to the hot tawny south of Italy. He was present at
Borgia's orgies, he roved among the Abruzzi, sought for Italian love
intrigues, grew ardent over pale faces and dark, almond-shaped eyes.
He shivered over midnight adventures, cut short by the cool thrust of
a jealous blade, as he saw a mediaeval dagger with a hilt wrought like
lace, and spots of rust like splashes of blood upon it.

India and its religions took the shape of the idol with his peaked cap
of fantastic form, with little bells, clad in silk and gold. Close by,
a mat, as pretty as the bayadere who once lay upon it, still gave out
a faint scent of sandal wood. His fancy was stirred by a goggle-eyed
Chinese monster, with mouth awry and twisted limbs, the invention of a
people who, grown weary of the monotony of beauty, found an
indescribable pleasure in an infinite variety of ugliness. A
salt-cellar from Benvenuto Cellini's workshop carried him back to the
Renaissance at its height, to the time when there was no restraint on
art or morals, when torture was the sport of sovereigns; and from
their councils, churchmen with courtesans' arms about them issued
decrees of chastity for simple priests.

On a cameo he saw the conquests of Alexander, the massacres of Pizarro
in a matchbox, and religious wars disorderly, fanatical, and cruel, in
the shadows of a helmet. Joyous pictures of chivalry were called up by
a suit of Milanese armor, brightly polished and richly wrought; a
paladin's eyes seemed to sparkle yet under the visor.

This sea of inventions, fashions, furniture, works of art and fiascos,
made for him a poem without end. Shapes and colors and projects all
lived again for him, but his mind received no clear and perfect
conception. It was the poet's task to complete the sketches of the
great master, who had scornfully mingled on his palette the hues of
the numberless vicissitudes of human life. When the world at large at
last released him, when he had pondered over many lands, many epochs,
and various empires, the young man came back to the life of the
individual. He impersonated fresh characters, and turned his mind to
details, rejecting the life of nations as a burden too overwhelming
for a single soul.

Yonder was a sleeping child modeled in wax, a relic of Ruysch's
collection, an enchanting creation which brought back the happiness of
his own childhood. The cotton garment of a Tahitian maid next
fascinated him; he beheld the primitive life of nature, the real
modesty of naked chastity, the joys of an idleness natural to mankind,
a peaceful fate by a slow river of sweet water under a plantain tree
that bears its pleasant manna without the toil of man. Then all at
once he became a corsair, investing himself with the terrible poetry
that Lara has given to the part: the thought came at the sight of the
mother-of-pearl tints of a myriad sea-shells, and grew as he saw
madrepores redolent of the sea-weeds and the storms of the Atlantic.

The sea was forgotten again at a distant view of exquisite miniatures;
he admired a precious missal in manuscript, adorned with arabesques in
gold and blue. Thoughts of peaceful life swayed him; he devoted
himself afresh to study and research, longing for the easy life of the
monk, devoid alike of cares and pleasures; and from the depths of his
cell he looked out upon the meadows, woods, and vineyards of his
convent. Pausing before some work of Teniers, he took for his own the
helmet of the soldier or the poverty of the artisan; he wished to wear
a smoke-begrimed cap with these Flemings, to drink their beer and join
their game at cards, and smiled upon the comely plumpness of a peasant
woman. He shivered at a snowstorm by Mieris; he seemed to take part in
Salvator Rosa's battle-piece; he ran his fingers over a tomahawk form
Illinois, and felt his own hair rise as he touched a Cherokee
scalping-knife. He marveled over the rebec that he set in the hands of
some lady of the land, drank in the musical notes of her ballad, and
in the twilight by the gothic arch above the hearth he told his love
in a gloom so deep that he could not read his answer in her eyes.

He caught at all delights, at all sorrows; grasped at existence in
every form; and endowed the phantoms conjured up from that inert and
plastic material so liberally with his own life and feelings, that the
sound of his own footsteps reached him as if from another world, or as
the hum of Paris reaches the towers of Notre Dame.

He ascended the inner staircase which led to the first floor, with its
votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines, and figures on the wall at
every step. Haunted by the strangest shapes, by marvelous creations
belonging to the borderland betwixt life and death, he walked as if
under the spell of a dream. His own existence became a matter of doubt
to him; he was neither wholly alive nor dead, like the curious objects
about him. The light began to fade as he reached the show-rooms, but
the treasures of gold and silver heaped up there scarcely seemed to
need illumination from without. The most extravagant whims of
prodigals, who have run through millions to perish in garrets, had
left their traces here in this vast bazar of human follies. Here,
beside a writing desk, made at the cost of 100,000 francs, and sold
for a hundred pence, lay a lock with a secret worth a king's ransom.
The human race was revealed in all the grandeur of its wretchedness;
in all the splendor of its infinite littleness. An ebony table that an
artist might worship, carved after Jean Goujon's designs, in years of
toil, had been purchased perhaps at the price of firewood. Precious
caskets, and things that fairy hands might have fashioned, lay there
in heaps like rubbish.

"You must have the worth of millions here!" cried the young man as he
entered the last of an immense suite of rooms, all decorated and gilt
by eighteenth century artists.

"Thousands of millions, you might say," said the florid shopman; "but
you have seen nothing as yet. Go up to the third floor, and you shall
see!"

The stranger followed his guide to a fourth gallery, where one by one
there passed before his wearied eyes several pictures by Poussin, a
magnificent statue by Michael Angelo, enchanting landscapes by Claude
Lorraine, a Gerard Dow (like a stray page from Sterne), Rembrandts,
Murillos, and pictures by Velasquez, as dark and full of color as a
poem of Byron's; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates,
wonderful cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the craftsman's
skill palled on the mind, masterpiece after masterpiece till art
itself became hateful at last and enthusiasm died. He came upon a
Madonna by Raphael, but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio
never received the glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of
antique porphyry carved round about with pictures of the most
grotesquely wanton of Roman divinities, the pride of some Corinna,
scarcely drew a smile from him.

The ruins of fifteen hundred vanished years oppressed him; he sickened
under all this human thought; felt bored by all this luxury and art.
He struggled in vain against the constantly renewed fantastic shapes
that sprang up from under his feet, like children of some sportive
demon.

Are not fearful poisons set up in the soul by a swift concentration of
all her energies, her enjoyments, or ideas; as modern chemistry, in
its caprice, repeats the action of creation by some gas or other? Do
not many men perish under the shock of the sudden expansion of some
moral acid within them?

"What is there in that box?" he inquired, as he reached a large closet
--final triumph of human skill, originality, wealth, and splendor, in
which there hung a large, square mahogany coffer, suspended from a
nail by a silver chain.

"Ah, _monsieur_ keeps the key of it," said the stout assistant
mysteriously. "If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly venture
to tell him."

"Venture!" said the young man; "then is your master a prince?"

"I don't know what he is," the other answered. Equally astonished,
each looked for a moment at the other. Then construing the stranger's
silence as an order, the apprentice left him alone in the closet.

Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you
read the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you
hung as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss
of the past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to
civilizations before the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and
layer upon layer of the quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of
the Ural range, the soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions of
peoples forgotten by feeble human memory and unrecognized by permanent
divine tradition, peoples whose ashes cover our globe with two feet of
earth that yields bread to us and flowers.

Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt
cities, like Cadmus, with monsters' teeth; has animated forests with
all the secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has
discovered a giant population from the footprints of a mammoth. These
forms stand erect, grow large, and fill regions commensurate with
their giant size. He treats figures like a poet; a naught set beside a
seven by him produces awe.

He can call up nothingness before you without the phrases of a
charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it,
says to you, "Behold!" All at once marble takes an animal shape, the
dead come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you.
After countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans
of mollusks, the race of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of
a splendid model, which the Creator has perchance destroyed.
Emboldened by his gaze into the past, this petty race, children of
yesterday, can overstep chaos, can raise a psalm without end, and
outline for themselves the story of the Universe in an Apocalypse that
reveals the past. After the tremendous resurrection that took place at
the voice of this man, the little drop in the nameless Infinite,
common to all spheres, that is ours to use, and that we call Time,
seems to us a pitiable moment of life. We ask ourselves the purpose of
our triumphs, our hatreds, our loves, overwhelmed as we are by the
destruction of so many past universes, and whether it is worth while
to accept the pain of life in order that hereafter we may become an
intangible speck. Then we remain as if dead, completely torn away from
the present till the _valet de chambre_ comes in and says, "_Madame la
comtesse_ answers that she is expecting _monsieur_."

All the wonders which had brought the known world before the young
man's mind wrought in his soul much the same feeling of dejection that
besets the philosopher investigating unknown creatures. He longed more
than ever for death as he flung himself back in a curule chair and let
his eyes wander across the illusions composing a panorama of the past.
The pictures seemed to light up, the Virgin's heads smiled on him, the
statues seemed alive. Everything danced and swayed around him, with a
motion due to the gloom and the tormenting fever that racked his
brain; each monstrosity grimaced at him, while the portraits on the
canvas closed their eyes for a little relief. Every shape seemed to
tremble and start, and to leave its place gravely or flippantly,
gracefully or awkwardly, according to its fashion, character, and
surroundings.

A mysterious Sabbath began, rivaling the fantastic scenes witnessed by
Faust upon the Brocken. But these optical illusions, produced by
weariness, overstrained eyesight, or the accidents of twilight, could
not alarm the stranger. The terrors of life had no power over a soul
grown familiar with the terrors of death. He even gave himself up,
half amused by its bizarre eccentricities, to the influence of this
moral galvanism; its phenomena, closely connected with his last
thoughts, assured him that he was still alive. The silence about him
was so deep that he embarked once more in dreams that grew gradually
darker and darker as if by magic, as the light slowly faded. A last
struggling ray from the sun lit up rosy answering lights. He raised
his head and saw a skeleton dimly visible, with its skull bent
doubtfully to one side, as if to say, "The dead will none of thee as
yet."

He passed his hand over his forehead to shake off the drowsiness, and
felt a cold breath of air as an unknown furry something swept past his
cheeks. He shivered. A muffled clatter of the windows followed; it was
a bat, he fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress.
He could yet dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by
the vague light in the west; then all these inanimate objects were
blotted out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour of death had
suddenly come. Thenceforward, for a while, he lost consciousness of
the things about him; he was either buried in deep meditation or sleep
overcame him, brought on by weariness or by the stress of those many
thoughts that lacerated his heart.

Suddenly he thought that an awful voice called him by name; it was
like some feverish nightmare, when at a step the dreamer falls
headlong over into an abyss, and he trembled. He closed his eyes,
dazzled by bright rays from a red circle of light that shone out from
the shadows. In the midst of the circle stood a little old man who
turned the light of the lamp upon him, yet he had not heard him enter,
nor move, nor speak. There was something magical about the apparition.
The boldest man, awakened in such a sort, would have felt alarmed at
the sight of this figure, which might have issued from some
sarcophagus hard by.

A curiously youthful look in the unmoving eyes of the spectre forbade
the idea of anything supernatural; but for all that, in the brief
space between his dreaming and waking life, the young man's judgment
remained philosophically suspended, as Descartes advises. He was, in
spite of himself, under the influence of an unaccountable
hallucination, a mystery that our pride rejects, and that our
imperfect science vainly tries to resolve.

Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black velvet gown
girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long white hair escaped on
either side of his face from under a black velvet cap which closely
fitted his head and made a formal setting for his countenance. His
gown enveloped his body like a winding sheet, so that all that was
left visible was a narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm,
thin as a draper's wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its
light upon him, the face would have seemed to hang in mid air. A gray
pointed beard concealed the chin of this fantastical appearance, and
gave him the look of one of those Jewish types which serve artists as
models for Moses. His lips were so thin and colorless that it needed a
close inspection to find the lines of his mouth at all in the pallid
face. His great wrinkled brow and hollow bloodless cheeks, the
inexorably stern expression of his small green eyes that no longer
possessed eyebrows or lashes, might have convinced the stranger that
Gerard Dow's "Money Changer" had come down from his frame. The
craftiness of an inquisitor, revealed in those curving wrinkles and
creases that wound about his temples, indicated a profound knowledge
of life. There was no deceiving this man, who seemed to possess a
power of detecting the secrets of the wariest heart.

The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed gathered up in
his passive face, just as all the productions of the globe had been
heaped up in his dusty showrooms. He seemed to possess the tranquil
luminous vision of some god before whom all things are open, or the
haughty power of a man who knows all things.

With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so altered the
expression of this face, that what had been a serene representation of
the Eternal Father should change to the sneering mask of a
Mephistopheles; for though sovereign power was revealed by the
forehead, mocking folds lurked about the mouth. He must have
sacrificed all the joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows
beneath his potent will. The man at the brink of death shivered at the
thought of the life led by this spirit, so solitary and remote from
our world; joyless, since he had no one illusion left; painless,
because pleasure had ceased to exist for him. There he stood,
motionless and serene as a star in a bright mist. His lamp lit up the
obscure closet, just as his green eyes, with their quiet malevolence,
seemed to shed a light on the moral world.

This was the strange spectacle that startled the young man's returning
sight, as he shook off the dreamy fancies and thoughts of death that
had lulled him. An instant of dismay, a momentary return to belief in
nursery tales, may be forgiven him, seeing that his senses were
obscured. Much thought had wearied his mind, and his nerves were
exhausted with the strain of the tremendous drama within him, and by
the scenes that had heaped on him all the horrid pleasures that a
piece of opium can produce.

But this apparition had appeared in Paris, on the Quai Voltaire, and
in the nineteenth century; the time and place made sorcery impossible.
The idol of French scepticism had died in the house just opposite, the
disciple of Gay-Lussac and Arago, who had held the charlatanism of
intellect in contempt. And yet the stranger submitted himself to the
influence of an imaginative spell, as all of us do at times, when we
wish to escape from an inevitable certainty, or to tempt the power of
Providence. So some mysterious apprehension of a strange force made
him tremble before the old man with the lamp. All of us have been
stirred in the same way by the sight of Napoleon, or of some other
great man, made illustrious by his genius or by fame.

"You wish to see Raphael's portrait of Jesus Christ, monsieur?" the
old man asked politely. There was something metallic in the clear,
sharp ring of his voice.

He set the lamp upon a broken column, so that all its light might fall
on the brown case.

At the sacred names of Christ and Raphael the young man showed some
curiosity. The merchant, who no doubt looked for this, pressed a
spring, and suddenly the mahogany panel slid noiselessly back in its
groove, and discovered the canvas to the stranger's admiring gaze. At
sight of this deathless creation, he forgot his fancies in the
show-rooms and the freaks of his dreams, and became himself again. The
old man became a being of flesh and blood, very much alive, with
nothing chimerical about him, and took up his existence at once upon
solid earth.

The sympathy and love, and the gentle serenity in the divine face,
exerted an instant sway over the younger spectator. Some influence
falling from heaven bade cease the burning torment that consumed the
marrow of his bones. The head of the Saviour of mankind seemed to
issue from among the shadows represented by a dark background; an
aureole of light shone out brightly from his hair; an impassioned
belief seemed to glow through him, and to thrill every feature. The
word of life had just been uttered by those red lips, the sacred
sounds seemed to linger still in the air; the spectator besought the
silence for those captivating parables, hearkened for them in the
future, and had to turn to the teachings of the past. The untroubled
peace of the divine eyes, the comfort of sorrowing souls, seemed an
interpretation of the Evangel. The sweet triumphant smile revealed the
secret of the Catholic religion, which sums up all things in the
precept, "Love one another." This picture breathed the spirit of
prayer, enjoined forgiveness, overcame self, caused sleeping powers of
good to waken. For this work of Raphael's had the imperious charm of
music; you were brought under the spell of memories of the past; his
triumph was so absolute that the artist was forgotten. The witchery of
the lamplight heightened the wonder; the head seemed at times to
flicker in the distance, enveloped in cloud.