in truth, a portrait gives the
sitter's temperament merged in the temperament of the painter.

So, as a rule, portraiture does but defeat its own end. And, stoically
speaking, does it much matter? Posterity has done just as well without
the transmission of the real Cardinal Hippolytus; and we know that
everything always comes right if only we look at it, Spinoza-like,
"under the category of the eternal." But we, meanwhile, are not
eternal, nor, alas! are our friends; and that is just one of the
things which gall us. We cannot believe--how could we?--that the
future can have its own witty men and gracious women, its own
sufficient objects of love and reverence, even as we have. We feel we
_must_ hand on our own great and beloved ones; we _must_ preserve the
evanescent personal fragrance, press the flower. And hence, again,
portraits and memoirs, Boswell's "Johnson," or Renan's "Ma Soeur
Henriette"; grotesque or lovely things, as the case may be, and always
pathetic, which tell us that men have always admired and always loved;
leaving us to explain, by substituting the image of our own idols, why
in that case more specially they did so. Poor people! We do so cling
to our particular self and self's preferences; we are so confidently
material and literal! And one dreads to think of the cruel
self-defence of posterity, when we shall try to push into its notice
with phonograph and cinematograph.

Let us, in the presence of such hideous machinery, cease to be literal
in matters of sentiment, even at the price of a little sadness and
cynicism in recognizing the unreality of everything save our own moods
and fancies. Perhaps I feel more strongly on this subject because I
happen to have seen with my own eyes the _reductio ad absurdum_--to
absurdity how lamentable and dreadful!--of this same human craving for
literal preservation of that which should not, cannot, be preserved. It
was in the lumber-room of an Italian palace; a life-size doll, with wig
of real--perhaps personally real--hair, and dressed from head to foot in
the garments of the real poor lady, dead some seventy years ago. I wrote
a little tale about it; but the main facts were true, and far surpassed
the power of invention. In this case the husband, who had ordered this
simulacrum for his solace, taking his daily dose of sentiment in its
presence, proceeded, after an interval, to woo and marry his own
laundress; and I think, on the whole, this was the least harrowin