DOI article:
Mackenzie, T.: The secret
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.38746#0239
By T. Mackenzie 235
other women is an absurd one. Who ever possessed a personality
like yours that you should be expected to resemble another ? I
would as lief imagine that I had two mothers, that two moons
ruled the sea’s tide, as fancy that any one like you in being and
in face ever set foot upon this stony world of stumbling. The
very sweep of your hair falling parted round your face is unique,
the colour of your eyes, neither blue nor green nor grey is un-
paralleled. Who else had hands like those upholding the casket,
unless perhaps it were he, whose stroke upon the lyre made the
mountain tops to bow in adoration ?
All around you is dark, mystic, suggestive ; the delicate tender-
ness of your face against the gloomy canvas is like the petal of a
wild rose adrift upon a murky stream, white and pink and leaf-
shaped.
There are those to whom Mystery is a thing of horror. The
unseen offers suggestions so unthinkable that the mind turns
drowning to what is comprehensible. To such as these my
picture will never be a thing of joy. It offers nothing that the
mind of man can fathom, and the thoughts it awakens bear no
name.
Some there are, and I am or this category, to whom pure
happiness is only possible when all that pertains to the intellect of
man is in abeyance, and the unreasoning, unstudied, uncalculating
part of him is in the ascendant, jubilant in the recklessness of
nature—divinely the brute. Ascetism may recoil at the words,
philosophy be shocked, nevertheless our most glorious passions are
those which are instinctive. Motherhood, Heroism, Love, do
they spring from the intellect ? Irrational, if you will so name
them, these instinctive, animal feelings have not lowered man-
kind ;
other women is an absurd one. Who ever possessed a personality
like yours that you should be expected to resemble another ? I
would as lief imagine that I had two mothers, that two moons
ruled the sea’s tide, as fancy that any one like you in being and
in face ever set foot upon this stony world of stumbling. The
very sweep of your hair falling parted round your face is unique,
the colour of your eyes, neither blue nor green nor grey is un-
paralleled. Who else had hands like those upholding the casket,
unless perhaps it were he, whose stroke upon the lyre made the
mountain tops to bow in adoration ?
All around you is dark, mystic, suggestive ; the delicate tender-
ness of your face against the gloomy canvas is like the petal of a
wild rose adrift upon a murky stream, white and pink and leaf-
shaped.
There are those to whom Mystery is a thing of horror. The
unseen offers suggestions so unthinkable that the mind turns
drowning to what is comprehensible. To such as these my
picture will never be a thing of joy. It offers nothing that the
mind of man can fathom, and the thoughts it awakens bear no
name.
Some there are, and I am or this category, to whom pure
happiness is only possible when all that pertains to the intellect of
man is in abeyance, and the unreasoning, unstudied, uncalculating
part of him is in the ascendant, jubilant in the recklessness of
nature—divinely the brute. Ascetism may recoil at the words,
philosophy be shocked, nevertheless our most glorious passions are
those which are instinctive. Motherhood, Heroism, Love, do
they spring from the intellect ? Irrational, if you will so name
them, these instinctive, animal feelings have not lowered man-
kind ;