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- 15604
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
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- 15553
- text
- not the abstract excellence always, but often the accidental
congeniality, which occasions this wonderful emotion. Still, the
individual himself is apt to impute it to a different cause; hence, the
headlong enthusiastic admiration of some one or two men for things not
at all praised by--or at most, which are indifferent to--the rest of the
world;--a matter so often considered inexplicable.
But in this Stranger's Head by the Unknown Hand, the abstract general
excellence united with the all-surprising, accidental congeniality in
producing an accumulated impression of power upon both Pierre and
Isabel. Nor was the strangeness of this at all impaired by the apparent
uninterestedness of Lucy concerning that very picture. Indeed,
Lucy--who, owing to the occasional jolting of the crowd, had loosened
her arm from Pierre's, and so, gradually, had gone on along the pictured
hall in advance--Lucy had thus passed the strange painting, without the
least special pause, and had now wandered round to the precisely
opposite side of the hall; where, at this present time, she was standing
motionless before a very tolerable copy (the only other good thing in
the collection) of that sweetest, most touching, but most awful of all
feminine heads--The Cenci of Guido. The wonderfulness of which head
consists chiefly, perhaps, in a striking, suggested contrast,
half-identical with, and half-analogous to, that almost supernatural
one--sometimes visible in the maidens of tropical nations--namely, soft
and light blue eyes, with an extremely fair complexion; vailed by
funereally jetty hair. But with blue eyes and fair complexion, the
Cenci's hair is golden--physically, therefore, all is in strict, natural
keeping; which, nevertheless, still the more intensifies the suggested
fanciful anomaly of so sweetly and seraphically _blonde_ a being, being
double-hooded, as it were, by the black crape of the two most horrible
crimes (of one of which she is the object, and of the other the agent)
possible to civilized humanity--incest and parricide.
Now, this Cenci and "the Stranger" were hung at a good elevation in one
of the upper tiers; and, from the opposite walls, exactly faced each
other; so that in secret they seemed pantomimically talking over and
across the heads of the living spectators below.
With the aspect of the Cenci every one is familiar. "The Stranger" was a
dark, comely, youthful man's head, portentously looking out of a dark,
shaded ground, and ambiguously smiling. There was no discoverable
drapery; the dark head, with its crisp, curly, jetty hair, seemed just
disentangling itself from out of curtains and clouds. But to Isabel, in
the eye and on the brow, were certain shadowy traces of her own
unmistakable likeness; while to Pierre, this face was in part as the
resurrection of the one he had burnt at the Inn. Not that the separate
features were the same; but the pervading look of it, the subtler
interior keeping of the entirety, was almost identical; still, for all
this, there was an unequivocal aspect of foreignness, of Europeanism,
about both the face itself and the general painting.
"Is it? Is it? Can it be?" whispered Isabel, intensely.
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