COUNTERFEIT PRESENTMENTS
normal insight or divination on the part of the artist. What must
be
a rather early embodiment of this long-lived theme is one of
E. T. A. Hoffmann's tales,
Doge und Dogaressa:
what happens here
is that a nineteenth-century painter represents in a painting two
genuinely historical personages, Marino Faliero and his young bride,
and quite without consciously intending to do so, imparts to the
young Dogaressa's countenance an expression which is subtly pre–
monitory of: the fate that, unbeknown to the artist, did in fact befall
her. The painting has revealed much more of the truth than the
painter himself, in any literal sense, could have "known."
Portraits which take on
.a
magical animation, portraits which speak
of an otherwise unsuspected reality-these are two of the kinds of
portraits which adorn the walls of Romantic fiction; a third is the
portrait which mysteriously exercises a baleful and even a fatal in–
fluence either on the painter himself or on the sitter or on some third
personage who falls under its spell. There can
be
few more intense
expressions of this theme than a story of Gogol's called simply "The
Portrait," a story in which a young painter's career is ravaged and
wrecked by the mere possession of a portrait- for its subject, an
evil old money-lender, is a symbol of low ambition and worldly
avarice.
How often the emblem may appear in the minor Russian writers
I cannot say; it was certainly a favorite with our own Gothic and
romantic writers in America. Everyone will recall the young painter
in Poe's tale, "The Oval Portrait," who, in a "dark high turret–
chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only from over–
head," paints a portrait of his young and lovely bride, which, stroke
by stroke as he paints it, steals from the girl
.a
portion of her vitality,
so that at the moment when it is finished, she herself expires, having
imparted to the picture the substance of her life. Like the picture of
Dorian Gray- the most celebrated of all these works of art- this
portrait of Poe's is a kind of inverse example of what folklorists call
the Life-Token, the magic object which is vitally identified with an
individual, so that it flourishes with his health and withers with his
illness and dies with his death; which may even
bring on
his death
if
it is blighted or cut down.
The American writer for whom, even more than for James,
the portrait was to be highly characteristic, was Hawthorne; but
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