PARTISAN REVIEW
unmistakably to the primordial line of which I am speaking; they
are an obvious example of what folklorists call Magic Objects, and
it is only because they represent individual human beings that they
interest us here so much more than the bleeding branches or the
speaking reeds which belong to the same broad category.
In any case, we can hardly set out on a treasure hunt through
oral and written literature for painted likenesses. I am broaching only
the smaller question of portraits and their use in the fiction of the
last century or two. Just when these particular works of art first
made their appearance, I do not know and will not undertake to
say; let us assume for convenience that at least a very early example
of the Romantic Portrait is that grim likeness of Prince Manfred's
grandfather which, in Horace Walpole's stagey little novel,
The Castle
of Otranto,
steps down out of its frame and, to Manfred's consterna–
tion, stalks with a melancholy air out of the apartment in which it
has been hanging. Whether it is really the very first of our modern
line or not, Walpole's picture did surely indicate that the ancient
emblem was about to take on a new life; the "Gothic" portrait had
arrived on ·the scene, and a peculiarly modern quality of feeling, a
peculiarly modern nuance of the poetic, the complex, the equivocal,
was about to attach itself to the old motif.
It very soon became evident that Gothic or Romantic writers
were going to find the portrait a device quite as irresistible to them
as music or musical instruments. Mrs. Radcliffe's novels abound in
mysterious miniatures which ertd by revealing unsuspected identities;
there is a beautiful and sinister portrait in the famous shocker,
The
Monk,
by M. G. Lewis, which becomes an emblem of sensual and
demoniac beauty; and perhaps the most memorable of them all
is
the terrible picture with the frightening eyes which young John
Melmoth, in Maturin's
M elmoth the Wanderer,
finds hanging in his
uncle's closet and burns to ashes after his uncle's death.
No one of these portraits behaves in quite what could be called
a frankly magical manner; there were plenty that did-though some–
times to the effect merely of charm or comedy, as in Gautier's witty
story,
Omphale,
in which the picture of a lovely eighteenth-century
marchioness comes to life for the amorous benefit of a young Parisian
of a later epoch. Nor dqes the preternatural power reside always in
the painted image itself; it
is
sometimes a question rather of super-
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