had laid its cruel hand upon it? It is not
tip-tilted like a flower; it is not whimsical with some ravishing and
unexpected little crook. It is straight, like a mathematical line. But
it has no parts. Her cheeks are round and fair. Each has its dimple
and blush. They are thoroughly healthy, Mrs. Smith's digestion is
unexceptionable. You might indicate the contour of these cheeks with a
pair of compasses; you might paint them with your thumb. Poor Mrs.
Smith's talk, or babble rather, is of her husband, her children, her
home. It is a mere purring over them. She never cuts them to pieces,
and holds them up to scorn and mockery. She never penetrates their
weaknesses. She does not even understand that Smith is a common-place,
stereotyped kind of fellow, exactly like hundreds of other men in his
class. She does not appear to notice the ghastly defects in his
education, tastes, and character, which gape before all the world
else. She does not see that he is without the _morbidezza_ of culture;
that he finds no _appogiatura_ in art; that he never rises at
midnight, amid lightning and rain, to emit an inarticulate cry of
aesthetic anguish in some metrical construction of the renaissance
period. She does not miss in him that yearning after the unattainable,
which in some mysterious wise fills us with a mute despair; which has
in it yet I know not what of sweetness amid the delirious aspirations
with which it distracts us. She cannot know, with her base instincts
dragging her down to the hearth-level of home and child, the material
gracelessness of her husband, equally incapable of striking an
Anglo-Saxon, or a mediaeval attitude; and with his blood flushed,
healthy face unable to realize in his expression that divine sorrow
which can alone distinguish the man of culture from ordinary
Englishmen, or the anthropoid apes. She will never know what vibrates
so harshly on us--the want of feeling for colour which is displayed in
the coarse tone of his brown hair. So in regard to her children, the
mind of Mrs. Smith is quite uncritical. Look at that baby, like a
thousand other babies you see every day. It has not a single
idiosyncrasy on which anyone above the intellectual level of a
_cretin_ could hang an affection. Its porcine eyes twinkle dimly
through rolls of fat; it splutters and puffs, and its habits are
simply abominable. What a gross home for that life's star, which hath
had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar! The star