The Portrait Incubus

THERE is a book yet to be written an intimate sort of book, not for the drawing-room, but for the closet. It will seem a little like a book of devotions, but much more like a Housekeepers’ Manual. Purely scientific in spirit, it will be wholly reverent, even a bit ceremonial in expression; and its title will be A Guide to the Decorous Destruction of Ancestors.

We may hesitate to admit it, but can we truthfully deny that at some time each one of us, deep down in his or her heart, — particularly her heart at house-cleaning time, — has longed for such a volume? We may even have been unconscious of the longing; or, acutely conscious, have smothered the thought in horrified haste, crushing it madly back into the Pandora’s box of evil suggestions that each is fated to carry about with him through life, but must strive to keep shut, with what success he can, for the good of Society. I confess the thought was no stranger to me when I suddenly came face to face with it the other day in a Boylston Street curio-shop.

It was a dismal place, that shop, full of the odds and ends that congregate in every such eddy of trade, — lame highboys, frivolous Empire tables, pieces of Sheffield plate, Mayflower chairs of doubtful parentage, and all the dusty, pitiful riff-raff of smaller objects that have once been precious, but are now discarded and utterly forlorn. Huddled together awaiting purchasers, jostled about the shop by a great demon of a porter, black as the pit from whence he was digged, and presided over by a callous young clerk, insensible alike to their pathos or their artistic merit, it was — if inanimate things have feelings of their own — a very inferno.

Hanging on the wall, in one corner overlooking the clutter, was a portrait. Not a very good portrait, even as portraits go (and, goodness knows, portraits go rapidly from bad to worse!) but a portrait with compelling gaze that caught the eye and would not be denied. Technically, it was a marvel of simplicity, a thing of flat tints and few colors, points connoisseurs rave over. But unfortunately these flat tints were laid on with the flat finality of the signpainter, instead of palpitating with hidden form as do the flat tints of a master. Presumably the picture was painted by some village artisan, some untaught genius whose days were spent in manual toil, but whose dreams and scanty holidays were held sacred to the goddess he could not openly woo. Of its two colors, one was a dull and faded blackish gray, resembling stovepolish, which once stood for dark blue. The other, a leathery yellow, was used impartially for the complexion and for touches of gold that enlivened the sombre material of the sitter’s uniform.

For this was a military portrait, showing a man not quite young, but very far from old. A man with thoughtful face, clean-shaven save for a slight moustache, thin cheeks, arched brows, rather long black hair sweeping away from a high forehead, and eyes that gazed out over a lapse of fifty years. The costume, that of a major in the early days of our Civil War, would have supplied the date had that been necessary, but the date was cut deep in every line of the sensitive face, carved there by the tools Nature reserves for her greatest triumph of mind over matter — when she moulds features and expression in whole generations of forceful men into consonance with some governing idea.

This was the student, the dreamer, of 1861, a face that the next four years were to change utterly; either blotting it from the earth, to halo its place with a martyr’s crown, or infusing it with an energy that removed it forever from the ranks of those who dream.

Meanwhile it was typical: a man American to the core, nervous, spare, highly strung, a trifle romantic, wholly earnest; the kind to respond to a great duty or a magnificent idea, no matter how repugnant it might be to the fibre of his being, and once enlisted in a cause, to follow it, even to the grave. Therefore, though he deprecated war, he wore a uniform, this saddest of all types of soldier — an officer without the lust of battle, who could lead his command unfalteringly to honorable death, but never, unaided, inspire it to headlong victory. Fortunately, other types marched with him in that hour, shoulder to shoulder; men in whose veins the red blood of magnetic leadership ran riot, whose courage fused with his own in the heat of combat to make the annals of those dark days glow like an epic from the Homeric past.

But what of the portrait’s history? How came it to be looking down on the dreary remains in this Boylston Street furniture-morgue? It is easy to divine the first chapters of its story. The small persistent daily self-denials that built up the sum required for this canvas, painted from a carte-de-visite after its original rode away and was swallowed up by that insatiable, all-consuming monster called the Army of the Potomac. Further weeks of economies went into the tarnished bit of gilt magnificence in which it was framed. One can see the shaded parlor where it hung; and if one is quite shameless, linger there to spy on the adoring, anxious, suffering eyes that gazed at it daily from the threshold, gathering courage from this sweet torture, to endure and hope on to the end.

What was the end? Was his one of the lives snuffed out, or did he come home broken in health but superb in spirit, his eagle’s glance not to be dimmed by age or pain? In either case the picture was no longer true. It lacked the nimbus, or the eagle’s eye. And forty-odd years have passed since that time. After the gentle soul to whom it was both torment and solace looked her last upon it, what happened? The frame seems to tell a tale of poverty and decay. Did the family slide down and down through grades of want until a last great sacrifice was demanded, and a pitiful procession of household gods passed under the hammer? Or did the family fortunes rise instead by leaps and bounds, soaring on inflated stocks until its younger members were wafted into a region where only ‘true’ art can be endured? Did they shudder at this sallow unvarnished old kinsman of theirs, and finally cast him out on the tender mercies of the ragman? Does a questionable Sir Joshua, or a blatantly prismatic Sorolla, hang in the whiteand-yellow drawing-room that long ago superseded that shadowy best parlor, with its mid-Victorian walnut and dark green window-shades?

And if—Oh, there are so many ifs!

First of them all is this: If we keep abreast of the times, accept modern notions about matter and development and all that (and nobody in this day questions the industry of germs, whatever secret animosity he may cherish toward Higher Criticism), are we not galloping on two horses at once, precariously near a fall, if we still cling blindly to worn-out conventions regarding our ancestors? After all, why should we be specially polite to those old worthies, we, who never saw them, never asked to be born, had no part in the passions that created us, and owned not a single share, either for gain or loss, in their great joint-stock company called the Past?

We should ‘honor our fathers and mothers’? Certainly; and love our brothers and sisters and, if we can, our uncles and aunts and cousins, and sundry isolated individuals in the third and fourth generations back of us — all of our ancestors in fact that we have known in the flesh. But behind them stretch indefinite lines and files and platoons of forebears, growing hazy in mortal outline, until they drop human semblance altogether, to take on grotesque forms of beasts and birds and prehistoric monsters, and finally sink to the less terrifying though equally potent protoplasm. What a collection of gargoyles our family portrait-gallery really contains!

No. Our obligations lie not so much in the dim past as in the vague and quite as indefinite future. And, granted that as a race we have outgrown some ancestors, does n’t it follow that we may as individuals outgrow others? And if this is so, is n’t it manifestly unfair to those who come after us, to saddle them with a lot of antiquated lumber for no better reason than that it bodies forth, more or less inaccurately, the mortal shapes of some dead and gone kinsmen?

Doubtless in the beginning there was excellent reason for treasuring and venerating family portraits; just as there was good solid reason for most of the customs that have hardened and caked into illogical conventions of twentieth-century life. Very likely self-preservation lay at the bottom of this one; since there was a time when right made might, and family glorification was part of the game. No, not of the game, — part of the grimly desperate struggle away from the beast toward higher things. Family arrogance made for supremacy. Family portraits were convenient, portable family history, evidence in tangible shape of family pride and power.

We have inherited the convention, and the arrogance. We have also invented the camera. And who can look upon a collection of family blue-prints as tangible evidence of anything except fatuous imbecility. Think of the tons of paper, blue, black, and brown, under which our family archives groan. And of their effect on the minds of an unprejudiced posterity! Uncle Lionel, at the age of seven weeks, clutching his nursing-bottle, is not calculated to inspire sentiments of valor, though Uncle Lionel grown to manhood, wielding a pen or a scalpel, or with his hand on the lever of a sky-soaring machine, may prove braver than all the heroes of antiquity rolled into one.

After all, however, it is not fair to hold the camera responsible. The mere march of years did it, and the coup de grâce really fell when portraits, like ancestors, became too numerous.

Take for instance, the Six gallery at Amsterdam. Its chief treasure, Rembrandt’s portrait of Burgomaster Six, with his reddish hair and glorious red cloak, is a priceless family monument, but infinitely more interesting as a record of the friendship of a great artist for a sturdy man. In the same gallery hangs the portrait of the Burgomaster’s mother, a dear fat old dame, on whose broad bosom one could willingly lay one’s head to rest, or weep. Then, scattered through the different rooms are half a dozen pictures of Dr. Tulp, the Burgomaster’s son-in-law, chiefly remarkable for their unlikeness to Rembrandt’s famous portrait of him in the Anatomy Lesson, and for the side-light they throw on his popularity, and his willingness to be ‘done in oil.’ In the hallway, where, fortunately, it is difficult to see it, hangs a likeness of the girl he married, painted when she was a very little maid. Let us hope it does her injustice. A modest portrait of the present Baroness is also in the collection. But if every Six, from the old Burgomaster down to his latest daughter-in-law, were represented, it would long ago have ceased to be a picture gallery and have become a multiplication-table!

This is not an argument against the manufacture of portraits. Let everybody be painted. The more the merrier! Artists must live. Family affection must find expression; private grief, if possible, be assuaged. Let every one who longs for a portrait of ‘dear Annie,’ or ‘dear Mother,’ or ‘cute little Joe,’have the desire of his heart satisfied. Though many are painted, few are saved — from final destruction. But, when the choice comes, let it, in Heaven’s name, be made on some more rational ground than the fetich of ancestor-worship. On what ground? Ah, that is another story. Our present concern is with the portraits that do not endure.

After the last person who personally cares for them is gone, — mind you, not until then, — and when they have become a burden to the artistic conscience, or a dead weight on the housekeeping instinct of those whose duty is to make homes for the living, it is time, high time, to get rid of these atrophied remains of a dead past. The question is, how to do it. We should go about it decently and quietly, even as Nature does when she undertakes a like task.

Shall the pictures be burned? I knew a family of girls, children of a darkeyed, energetic western father, who was something of a political force in his state and day. A man he once befriended showed his gratitude by painting a life-sized portrait of his benefactor, and presenting it to the family. It had blue eyes, and was putty-faced, and about as unlike him as could well be imagined, but it was a gift, and a ‘portrait,’ and the family suffered under the incubus for several years, moving it from place to place about the house, to ease the pain. Finally the politician received his reward, and was translated to Washington, as good politicians sometimes are. Preliminary to the family flitting, there was a grand clearing-out of household rubbish. A great bonfire heap was made in the side-yard, and when the eldest daughter came upon her mother hesitating before this picture, she seized it firmly by the frame, a younger sister lent a willing hand, and the two bore it joyously forth and laid it on top of the pile.

Then the torch was applied, and the family of girls joined hands and circled slowly about it, singing a dirge, and waiting for the picture to burn. But it would n’t ignite, and would n’t, although the flames crackled merrily underneath. One of the girls, almost hysterical, got a long pole, and poked it viciously in the ribs. Then it caught, and they circled faster and faster about the pile, watching it writhe and twist in the blaze like a tortured thing. The blue eyes rolled up and glared at them. A sudden draft took one slowly-consuming fist and shook it in their faces; and at that moment one of them raised her head and saw the donor coming up the driveway. With a shriek she fled, and the others vanished after her; all but the eldest, who stood her ground with very red cheeks, and the long pole clasped in a plucky if trembling hand.

There must be better ways than burning old pictures.

Another friend endured in silence as long as she could. Her incubus was a group portrait with spacious botanical background, showing two dropsical darlings of a great-aunt-by-marriage. The children died in infancy three quarters of a century ago. Their mother, in the last years of her pathetic boardinghouse existence, begged, as a special favor, to have the precious canvas stored in her nephew’s attic. And although she herself had long passed away, her niece-by-marriage continued to dust and care for the picture with New England thoroughness. At last one day when things were very still, and her heart very rebellious, she armed herself with a pair of huge shears, and mounting to the top of the house, cut that canvas into inch bits, feeling the while more criminal than Herod. And even after the deed was done, there were the fragments, hundreds of them, to be disposed of.

Clearly, cutting is not the way.

Nature has kindly moth, soft velvet rust, and silent caressing corruption in endless forms, to aid her in such undertakings. Human methods seem so crude in comparison.

Shall the pictures be sold? Strange, is n’t it, what effects certain combinations of words have on the adult mind ? For example, those five short monosyllables, ‘His own flesh and blood.’ A sense of warmth, of possession, of protecting care, flows through one at the very sound of them. Prefix three other monosyllables, equally short and harmless—make it, instead, ‘ He would sell his own flesh and blood,’ and outraged nature responds with a thrill of horror—possibly also of secret admiration for such thorough-paced villainy — comparable to nothing short of the tingle that goes through infant veins at the incantation, ’Fee, fi, fo, fum.'

Shall cast-off family portraits be sold? No; a thousand times no! That was what happened to the Boylston Street soldier.

Then what can be done? They ought to be destroyed, irrevocably, utterly; but there must be reverence and dignity in the act. Fire is too savage; cutting too brutal; selling is not to be thought of, and Nature’s kindly moth and corruption are agencies too slow and too subtle for our needs.

Surely there is a place in the world for that book I long to see, — that thin, prim little volume on whose title-page those who seek it may read: A Guide to the Decorous Destruction of Ancestors.