He thought over all this as he sat with the crumpled programme in
his hand. Was it ever possible to bury a thing entirely? Had not
everything which we thought dead a terrible faculty of raising itself
at most unexpected moments? A scrap of paper--a few words in a printed
book--these could be the last trump for a buried sin, and it would rise.
He got up off the sofa--these were ugly thoughts--and went on looking
for the book he had come to find. Ah, there it was in its paper
cover--_Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. He had bought it on his way down from
London, but had not yet looked at it.
He opened it and glanced at a few pages; and then, sitting down where
he had been before, read the whole book straight through. He was
strangely excited and wrought upon by it, and his mind was beginning
to grope in the darkness after an idea. Yes, surely, this was the
essence of portrait-painting: not to present a man as he was at a
particular moment, in one particular part, with the emblem of one
particular pursuit by him--an artist with his canvas, a sculptor with
his clay--but the whole man, his Jekyll and his Hyde together in one
picture.
Then in a moment his mind, as it were, found the handle of the door
for which it had been groping in darkness, and flung it open, letting
in the full blaze of a complete idea. There is only one human being on
earth whom any artist who ever lived could paint completely. It is only
a man himself who wholly knows both the side he turns to the world and
the side he would hide even from himself but cannot.
Frank's hands trembled nervously, and his breath came and went quickly.
He would paint himself as no man yet had ever painted either himself or
any one else. He would put his Jekyll and Hyde on the canvas for men
to wonder at and to be silent before. He would do what no artist had
ever yet done. He thought of that room in the Uffizi at Florence which
holds the portrait of the Italian families, each painted by himself:
Raphael, with his young, beardless face--Raphael, the painter, and no
more; Andrea del Sarto, not the painter, but the liver. Each of them
had painted marvellously outside themselves--one gift, one way of love.
But he would do more: he would paint himself as the husband and lover
of Margery, the Jekyll of himself, who had known and knew the best
capabilities for loving in his nature; and he would paint his Hyde,
the man who had lived as other men in Paris--a Bohemian, careless,
worthless, finding this thing and that honey at the moment, but to the
soul wormwood and bitterness. The wormwood should be there, and the
honey; his love for his wife and his rejection and loathing of those
earlier days which he had thought were dead, but which had risen and
without their honey. His own face, painted by himself, should be the
book out of which he should be judged; for love and lust, happiness and
misery, innocence and guilt--all unite their indelible marks there, and
no one can ever efface the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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