"You are right!" said Stangrave: "and you will do the man himself good by refusing; he has some notion still of what a portrait ought to be. If he once begins by attempting passing expressions of passion, which is all stage portraits can give, he will find them so much easier than honest representations of character, that he will end, where all our moderns seem to do, in merest melodrama." "Explain!" said she. "Portrait painters now depend for their effect on the mere accidents of the _entourage_; on dress, on landscape, even on broad hints of a man's occupation, putting a plan on the engineer's table, and a roll in the statesman's hands, like the old Greek who wrote 'this is an ox' under his picture. If they wish to give the face expression, though they seldom aim so high, all they can compass is a passing emotion; and one sitter goes down to posterity with an eternal frown, another with an eternal smile." "Or, if he be a poet," said Sabina, "rolls his eye for ever in a fine frenzy." "But would you forbid them to paint passion?" "Not in its place; when the picture gives the causes of the passion, and the scene tells its own story. But then let us not have merely Kean as Hamlet, but Hamlet's self; let the painter sit down and conceive for himself a Hamlet, such as Shakspeare conceived; not merely give us as much of him as could be pressed at a given moment into the face of Mr. Kean. He will be only unjust to both actor and character. If Flake paints Marie as Lady Macbeth, he will give us neither her nor Lady Macbeth; but only the single point at which their two characters can coincide." "How rude!" said Sabina, laughing; "what is he doing but hinting that La Signora's conception of Lady Macbeth is a very partial and imperfect one?" "And why should it not be?" asked the actress, humbly enough. "I meant," he answered warmly, "that there was more, far more in her than in any character which she assumes; and I do not want a painter to copy only one aspect, and let a part go down to posterity as a representation of the whole." "If you mean that, you shall be forgiven. No; when she is painted, she shall be painted as herself, as she is now. Claude shall paint her." "I have not known La Signora long enough," said Claude, "to aspire to such an honour. I paint no face which I have not studied for a year." "Faith!" said Scoutbush, "you would find no more in most faces at the year's end, than you did the first day." "Then I would not paint them. If I paint a portrait, which I seldom do, I wish to make it such a one as the old masters aimed at,--to give the sum total of the whole character; traces of every emotion, if it were possible, and glances of every expression which have passed over it since it was born into the world. They are all here, the whole past and future of the man; and every man, as the Mohammedans say, carries his destiny on his forehead." "But who has eyes to see it?"