The Ghost of Art Page #2

"The Ghost of Art" is a lesser-known work by Charles Dickens, blending his signature wit and social commentary with a supernatural twist. Set in a vibrant artistic community, the story explores themes of creativity, inspiration, and the haunting presence of artistic ambition. Through the encounters with a spectral figure representing the essence of art, the narrative delves into the struggles of artists grappling with their craft and the societal pressures they face. Dickens illuminates the complexities of the artistic journey, ultimately emphasizing the enduring power and influence of art in shaping human experience.

• Short story

								

Mortimerses, or Garrardses, and Davenportseseses.’

Excited, as it appeared, by a sense of injury, I thought he would never
have found an end for the last word.  But, at length it rolled sullenly
away with the thunder.

‘Pardon me,’ said I, ‘you are a well-favoured, well-made man, and
yet—forgive me—I find, on examining my mind, that I associate you
with—that my recollection indistinctly makes you, in short—excuse me—a
kind of powerful monster.’

‘It would be a wonder if it didn’t,’ he said.  ‘Do you know what my
points are?’

‘No,’ said I.

‘My throat and my legs,’ said he.  ‘When I don’t set for a head, I mostly
sets for a throat and a pair of legs.  Now, granted you was a painter,
and was to work at my throat for a week together, I suppose you’d see a
lot of lumps and bumps there, that would never be there at all, if you
looked at me, complete, instead of only my throat.  Wouldn’t you?’

‘Probably,’ said I, surveying him.

‘Why, it stands to reason,’ said the Model.  ‘Work another week at my
legs, and it’ll be the same thing.  You’ll make ’em out as knotty and as
knobby, at last, as if they was the trunks of two old trees.  Then, take
and stick my legs and throat on to another man’s body, and you’ll make a
reg’lar monster.  And that’s the way the public gets their reg’lar
monsters, every first Monday in May, when the Royal Academy Exhibition
opens.’

‘You are a critic,’ said I, with an air of deference.

‘I’m in an uncommon ill humour, if that’s it,’ rejoined the Model, with
great indignation.  ‘As if it warn’t bad enough for a bob a-hour, for a
man to be mixing himself up with that there jolly old furniter that one
‘ud think the public know’d the wery nails in by this time—or to be
putting on greasy old ‘ats and cloaks, and playing tambourines in the Bay
o’ Naples, with Wesuvius a smokin’ according to pattern in the
background, and the wines a bearing wonderful in the middle distance—or
to be unpolitely kicking up his legs among a lot o’ gals, with no reason
whatever in his mind but to show ’em—as if this warn’t bad enough, I’m to
go and be thrown out of employment too!’

‘Surely no!’ said I.

‘Surely yes,’ said the indignant Model.  ‘BUT I’LL GROW ONE.’

The gloomy and threatening manner in which he muttered the last words,
can never be effaced from my remembrance.  My blood ran cold.

I asked of myself, what was it that this desperate Being was resolved to
grow.  My breast made no response.

I ventured to implore him to explain his meaning.  With a scornful laugh,
he uttered this dark prophecy:

‘I’LL GROW ONE.  AND, MARK MY WORDS, IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!’

We parted in the storm, after I had forced half-a-crown on his
acceptance, with a trembling hand.  I conclude that something
supernatural happened to the steamboat, as it bore his reeking figure
down the river; but it never got into the papers.

Two years elapsed, during which I followed my profession without any
vicissitudes; never holding so much as a motion, of course.  At the
expiration of that period, I found myself making my way home to the
Temple, one night, in precisely such another storm of thunder and
lightning as that by which I had been overtaken on board the
steamboat—except that this storm, bursting over the town at midnight, was
rendered much more awful by the darkness and the hour.

As I turned into my court, I really thought a thunderbolt would fall, and
plough the pavement up.  Every brick and stone in the place seemed to
have an echo of its own for the thunder.  The waterspouts were
overcharged, and the rain came tearing down from the house-tops as if
they had been mountain-tops.

Mrs. Parkins, my laundress—wife of Parkins the porter, then newly dead of
a dropsy—had particular instructions to place a bedroom candle and a
match under the staircase lamp on my landing, in order that I might light
my candle there, whenever I came home.  Mrs. Parkins invariably
disregarding all instructions, they were never there.  Thus it happened
that on this occasion I groped my way into my sitting-room to find the
candle, and came out to light it.

What were my emotions when, underneath the staircase lamp, shining with
wet as if he had never been dry since our last meeting, stood the
mysterious Being whom I had encountered on the steamboat in a
thunderstorm, two years before!  His prediction rushed upon my mind, and
I turned faint.

‘I said I’d do it,’ he observed, in a hollow voice, ‘and I have done it.
May I come in?’

‘Misguided creature, what have you done?’ I returned.

‘I’ll let you know,’ was his reply, ‘if you’ll let me in.’

Could it be murder that he had done?  And had he been so successful that
he wanted to do it again, at my expense?

I hesitated.

‘May I come in?’ said he.

I inclined my head, with as much presence of mind as I could command, and
he followed me into my chambers.  There, I saw that the lower part of his
face was tied up, in what is commonly called a Belcher handkerchief.  He
slowly removed this bandage, and exposed to view a long dark beard,
curling over his upper lip, twisting about the corners of his mouth, and
hanging down upon his breast.

‘What is this?’ I exclaimed involuntarily, ‘and what have you become?’

‘I am the Ghost of Art!’ said he.

The effect of these words, slowly uttered in the thunder-storm at
midnight, was appalling in the last degree.  More dead than alive, I
surveyed him in silence.

‘The German taste came up,’ said he, ‘and threw me out of bread.  I am
ready for the taste now.’

He made his beard a little jagged with his hands, folded his arms, and
said,

‘Severity!’

I shuddered.  It was so severe.

He made his beard flowing on his breast, and, leaning both hands on the
staff of a carpet-broom which Mrs. Parkins had left among my books, said:

‘Benevolence.’

I stood transfixed.  The change of sentiment was entirely in the beard.
The man might have left his face alone, or had no face.

The beard did everything.

He lay down, on his back, on my table, and with that action of his head
threw up his beard at the chin.

‘That’s death!’ said he.

He got off my table and, looking up at the ceiling, cocked his beard a
little awry; at the same time making it stick out before him.

‘Adoration, or a vow of vengeance,’ he observed.

He turned his profile to me, making his upper lip very bulky with the
upper part of his beard.

‘Romantic character,’ said he.

He looked sideways out of his beard, as if it were an ivy-bush.
‘Jealousy,’ said he.  He gave it an ingenious twist in the air, and
informed me that he was carousing.  He made it shaggy with his
fingers—and it was Despair; lank—and it was avarice: tossed it all kinds
of ways—and it was rage.  The beard did everything.

‘I am the Ghost of Art,’ said he.  ‘Two bob a-day now, and more when it’s
longer!  Hair’s the true expression.  There is no other.  I SAID I’D GROW
IT, AND I’VE GROWN IT, AND IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!’

He may have tumbled down-stairs in the dark, but he never walked down or
ran down.  I looked over the banisters, and I was alone with the thunder.
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