g
possible solution. Fancy if he had not found that form of consolation,
but had continued trying to be faithful to that dreadful material
presence, more rigid, lifeless, meaningless, with every day and every
year of familiarity!

In a small way, we all of us commit that man's mistake of thinking that
the life of our dear ones is in an image, instead of in the heartbeats
which the image--like a name, a place, any associated thing--can
produce in ourselves. And only changing things can answer to our
changing self; only living creatures live with us. Once learned by
heart, the portrait, be it never so speaking, ceases to speak, or we to
listen to its selfsame message. What was once company to us, because it
awakened a flickering feeling of wished-for presence, becomes, after a
time, mere canvas or paper; disintegrates into mere colours or mere
black and white. Even the faithfullest among us are utterly faithless to
the best-beloved portraits. We have them on our walls or on our
writing-tables, and pack and unpack some of them for every journey. But
do we look at them? or, looking, do we see them, feel them?

They are not, however, useless; very far from it. You might as well
complain of the uselessness of the fire which is burned out, or the
extinguished lamp. They have, though for a brief time, pleased, perhaps
even consoled, us--warmed our heart with the sense of a loving nearness,
shed a light on the visions in our mind. Hence we should cherish them as
useful delusions, or rather realities, so long as they awaken a reality
of feeling. And 'tis a decent instinct of gratitude, not mere
inertness, which causes us to keep them, honoured pensioners of our
affections, in honourable places.

Only one thing we should guard against, and act firmly about, despite
all sentimental scruples. During the _period of activity_ of a
portrait--I mean while we still, more or less, look at it--we must
beware lest it take, in our memory, the place of the original. Those
unchanging features have the insistence of their definiteness and
permanence, and may insidiously extrude, exclude, the fleeting,
vacillating outlines of the remembered reality. And those alone concern
our heart, and have a right to occupy our fancy. One feels aghast
sometimes, on meeting some dear friend after an interval of absence, to
find that those real features, that real expression, are not the
familiar ones. It is the portrait, the envious counterfeit presentment,