Authors: Steven Millhauser
Such strains and dangerous tensions do much to account for the darker aspect of the portrait of William Pinney, for Moorash was acutely sensitive to Pinney’s moods and cannot have failed to sense his friend’s secret doubts and disapprovals. It is not surprising to learn that he showed the portrait to Pinney (on 14 August 1845); Elizabeth witnessed the event. Pinney looked at the painting a long time in silence. He then turned, threw Moorash “such a look as I cannot describe, for it was scarcely a human look,” and walked away without a word. It was the only time he had failed to say something about one of his friend’s paintings. As for Moorash, he turned to Elizabeth with a look of “angry triumph” and said: “See! He’s hit!”
[24]
SOPHIA PINNEY
1844–46?
Oil on canvas, 34 1/2 × 28 in.
The earliest direct mention of a portrait of Sophia is in Elizabeth’s Journal for May 1844, although it is not certain that this
is the same canvas as the one Moorash is said to have been working on in December. He appears to have begun two paintings, abandoning the first in favor of the surviving one, which betrays a clear kinship with the portrait of William Pinney and may have been influenced by it. Sophia was shown the painting on 31 August 1845, two and a half weeks after William had viewed his own portrait; nevertheless, Moorash appears to have continued working on it during the next few weeks, setting it aside in late September for the
Death Sonata.
He may have taken it up again briefly in the early months of 1846; the evidence (see Havemeyer) remains inconclusive.
Again we have the familiar lake and line of hills, this time in the dwindling light of a summer evening. Brooding over the scene, like a spirit of the lake, is an elongated and ethereal Sophia, whose lower body vanishes in the water and whose long upper body winds serpentlike across the lake and back; her flowing hair continues the liquid lines of her body, and is shown winding among the hills. The sweeping lines of the creature, twisting back and forth along the canvas, create a paradoxical feeling of energy and repose, as of a bird in flight; the barely human face is stricken with grief. Elizabeth, who first saw the portrait in company with Sophia, wrote in the Journal (31 August 1845): “As if struck with lightning. E paints the soul directly, unencumbered by outward circumstance. Why does S’s sorrow waken in me such a clash and hubbub of feelings? She looks at me as though I were all princess-white in my coffin. Away! I crave the physic of laughter. Am I grown so cruel?”
Moorash’s vision of a sorrowing Sophia may have been “prophetic,” as Havemeyer puts it, and it may have been a “psychic reversal’ (Altdorfer, p. 216) in which Moorash transposed his own love-sorrow onto the features of the woman who had rejected him, but the facts suggest that Moorash was not making an imaginative leap in the dark. Sophia Pinney may have lacked spiritual greatness, but she was by no means the shallow egotist
she has sometimes been made out to be. She did not love Moorash or understand his work, but she behaved admirably in extremely trying circumstances; and in her passionate devotion to Elizabeth she rose above herself to spiritual heights from which she sometimes looked down aghast. Elizabeth was a powerful woman who exercised a kind of spell over Sophia, even more so than Moorash did over William Pinney. Under that spell, Sophia bent her life into a shape that more and more came to resemble the shape of Elizabeth’s life; for although she liked to deny it, Sophia’s decision to live with her brother on Black Lake was clearly influenced by Elizabeth’s decision to live with Edmund. Sophia was as open to Elizabeth as she was closed to Elizabeth’s brother, and we have seen that her acute sensitivity took the disturbing form of empathic suffering. In the early days of Elizabeth’s illness, Sophia liked nothing better than to sit with Elizabeth in her sickroom for whole afternoons, reading aloud to her or remaining absolutely quiet if necessary, tending to her slightest needs, and passing the long hours by knitting a shawl for Elizabeth or rummaging among the supplies in Elizabeth’s sewing table for the thread, thimble, needle, and scissors that she used for mending Elizabeth’s frayed clothes. But as her friend’s illness worsened, Sophia’s own symptoms became more pronounced; and as many letters to Fanny Cornwall and Eunice Hamilton attest, Sophia’s suffering was increased by the knowledge that because of her own prostrating headaches she was not always able to come to Elizabeth’s side. In any case she felt utterly useless in preventing Elizabeth’s decline. She believed passionately that Elizabeth’s life with her brother was harming Elizabeth’s health; and she never forgave Moorash for keeping his sister, as Sophia saw it, from marrying William. Her desire for Elizabeth’s marriage to William appears to have been genuine, although it is difficult to believe she would not have experienced jealousy; it is possible that she desired what she could not permit herself to desire, a life alone with Elizabeth. Certainly,
at the very least, she was deeply jealous of Elizabeth’s devotion to Edmund. In the summer of 1845 that devotion took a strange turn, which appears to have shocked Sophia.
On an afternoon in late June when the men had walked to Saccanaw Falls to buy a bag of nails and drink a pint of ale at the Cat and Robin, Elizabeth on her sickbed made to Sophia a remarkable proposal. Staring earnestly at Sophia, she offered to marry William if Sophia would marry Edmund. The proposal threw Sophia into confusion and turmoil, as she reports in a letter (unsent) to Fanny Cornwall. She understood immediately that the wild scheme had been hatched for the sake of Edmund: Elizabeth, whose entire life had in Sophias view been a continual sacrifice to Edmund, was willing to sacrifice herself even further for the sake of giving Edmund what he so desperately wanted: Sophia. Sophia, angry at the proposal’s secret cause, nevertheless felt it as a fearful challenge: was she willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her brother’s, and even more for the sake of Elizabeth, who would be delivered from her prison and would regain her health? The thought of moving into Stone Hill Cottage, of, as it were,
replacing
Elizabeth, struck her as strange and dreamlike, and not wholly unpleasing; but to marry Moorash, who made her feel “cold all over,” was out of the question. Sophia spent an anguished night and rose at dawn no longer knowing how she felt. After a dreamlike breakfast she rowed across Black Lake with William in the “fierce light” of a cloudless blue day and walked with him the two miles to Stone Hill Cottage, where William left to look for Edmund in the barn. In the dusk of Elizabeth’s curtained sickroom Sophia felt dazed; she was on the verge of saying yes, as if acceding to a terrible fatality, when Elizabeth, who was feeling better, immediately retracted her proposal of the other day, calling it “a wild idea bred of illness.” Sophia, feeling faint, sat down quickly. The entire episode goes unmentioned in Elizabeth’s Journal.
Later that month there occurred another incident that must
be taken into account in any consideration of Moorash’s portrait of Sophia. She had spent the morning confined to her room in the cottage on Black Lake, unable to accompany William to Stone Hill Cottage, where he was to read to Elizabeth for an hour before returning to Sophia. In the course of the morning her mood darkened and she experienced a sharp premonition of Elizabeth’s death. William returned to find her tense and agitated; after assuring her that Elizabeth was well, he took Sophia with him on horseback to Stone Hill Cottage, where he left her to ride into town. He returned to find her lying with her eyes closed on the sofa in the kitchen, being read to by Elizabeth while Moorash paced anxiously. Elizabeth recorded the incident in her Journal: she had been asleep, and woke to find Sophia sobbing hysterically and shrieking her name. Edmund, hearing the shouts from the barn, hurried to the house, where he discovered Elizabeth attempting to revive Sophia, who had fainted. When Sophia came to, she said that she had entered the darkened sickroom with a feeling of oppression and had been struck by Elizabeth’s extreme pallor and stillness. She had spoken to Elizabeth, who lay with closed eyes; she had called out her name and shaken her shoulder, but Elizabeth lay motionless; her cheek felt deathly cold. It had been too much for Sophia, and she had burst into tears—after that, all was darkness. Elizabeth, with her usual sharpness, noted two things about her brother in the doorway: that he had “hesitated, with a kind of modesty, from intruding into the room, as if by coming to Sophia’s aid while she was unconscious he would be taking advantage of her—until I summoned him to me,” and that he had a spot of red paint on the side of his nose, which at first she had mistaken for blood.
Elizabeth also recorded the viewing of Sophia’s portrait, an event arranged for the last day in August. William’s absence on this occasion is not explained. It was Elizabeth who persuaded Sophia to walk with her down to the barn, where Edmund had covered the portrait with a white cloth. Was he thinking at that
moment of
The Unveiling
[8], his painting of 1837? He stood for a moment staring at the cloth, then crying “So!” removed it with a flourish. Elizabeth, as we have seen, was violently moved: “As if struck with lightning. E paints the soul directly, unencumbered by outward circumstance.” Sophia’s response, as always, was disappointing. She looked at the portrait with an expression of blank politeness that slowly changed to irritation; and turning to Moorash “with an odd little smile,” asked whether her hair was really so much in need of combing as that.
[25]
ELIZABETH MOORASH
1845–46
Oil on canvas, 34 1/2 × 28 1/2 in.
The final portrait of Elizabeth was begun in October 1845. Moorash worked at it continuously for about a month and then fitfully until the following May, when he set aside all his paintings for the ill-fated self-portrait.
Over the dark lake, Elizabeth lies sleeping. So deeply sunk in sleep is she that she appears to be under an enchantment. And indeed there is an air of enchanted stillness in the dark repose of the painting, as of a wildness calmed. It is as if the tension and disturbing energy of the portraits of William and Sophia have been transposed into peace—the same long, flowing lines here resolve into restfulness. The portrait has about it a storybook air: Elizabeth is a princess closed in a tower of sleep, to which no prince will come. Deeply, deeply, Elizabeth lies sleeping, in a spell from which she can never awake. But the world too lies sleeping: the hills, the night sky, the lake, all have fallen asleep beside and beneath and within her. The effect is different from that of
Elizabeth in Dream
[5], for there the world was dissolved by the dreamer, but here there is no dreamer and
no dream; rather, there is the vision of an animate universe stilled in sleep. It is, if you like, a childlike vision, but one deepened with adult knowledge—it is such a vision as is possible only after a searing spiritual struggle. For in this portrait Moorash has done nothing less than imagine Elizabeth’s death; and by lifting it into a realm beyond grief, he has come out on the other side of anguish.
By the summer of 1845 Elizabeth’s headaches and other ailments were causing her to spend more and more time indoors, where she became increasingly dependent on the soothing effects of laudanum, prescribed by a Dr. Long of Strawson and easily obtainable in the two druggist shops of Saccanaw Falls. Only in the remissions of her illness was she able to leave Stone Hill Cottage to take long walks in her beloved woods, along her stream, or in the direction of Black Lake. After a particularly bad attack in late summer William persuaded Moorash to let him hire a housekeeper, a Mrs. Duff from Strawson, who came three times a week and soon became deeply devoted to both Elizabeth and Edmund. Elizabeth at first protested, but she quickly succumbed; there were certain chores she could no longer do.
The absence of Dr. Long’s medical records, and the predominance of nonspecific symptoms such as headaches and dizziness, make it impossible to determine the nature of Elizabeth’s illness, which may or may not have been psychosomatic. Although a depressive disorder cannot be ruled out, neither the Journal nor the scanty medical records provide conclusive evidence (see Havemeyer, p. 210 ff., for a complete summary). The “vertigo” and headaches suggest the strong possibility of high blood pressure; but since a practical blood-pressure gauge was not invented until the end of the century, all such suggestions must remain entirely speculative. Although hypertension or some related cardiovascular pathology would explain most, if not all, of Elizabeth’s symptoms, they can also have resulted from other causes, such as extreme anxiety or excitement. Finally,
in any consideration of illness before the mid-nineteenth century—that is, before the discovery of drug-induced poisoning—it must always be kept in mind that the manifestation of new, unexplained symptoms may have been caused by the doctors themselves.
Although the Journal records an increased irritability to certain stimuli, such as the sharp sound of a knife on a plate, the smell of urine, and the sudden dimming and flaring up of a candleflame because of imperfections in the wick, one of the odder manifestations of Elizabeth’s illness was heightened sensitivity to literature, music, and art. Certain slow, languorous rhythms in the 1842
Poems
of Alfred Tennyson, specific hushed, dreamy, drowsily drawn-out effects in Keats, produced by long vowels interwoven with droning
m’s
and n’s and softened with sibilants (she records “The maiden’s chamber, silken, hushed, and chaste” from
The Eve of St. Agnes)
, stray lines suggesting a mysterious vastness (“Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness”) or ringing with a call to some high action (“Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?”) would bring a quickening of heartbeat and flushed cheeks, so that Elizabeth would be forced to put aside a volume and lie with her hands folded on her collarbone, as if to press down her excitement. Listening to Sophia play Schumann’s
In der Nacht
from the
Fantasiestücke
, op. 12, or Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major, op. 9, no. 2, or the
andante doloroso
of Sonnenstein’s Brocken Sonata, op. 16, with its long chains of unresolved harmonic suspensions and its plunging five-note motif, she would be brought to a state of dangerous exaltation, during which a pulse throbbed “visibly” in her neck (did she observe herself in the mirror?) and she felt alternately fiery hot and icy cold. But it was the art of painting that evoked in her the strongest and most disturbing responses. Once when William brought her a book of engravings of medieval German paintings, Elizabeth was gripped by a feverish excitement that kept her from sleep all that night and led the next morning to a fit of such
violent coughing that Edmund in alarm had to summon Dr. Long from Strawson. She seemed to take in a picture all at once, like a sudden blow, and to experience it not simply in her nerve endings but in the deepest fibers of her being. It was as though some protective film had been dissolved by her illness, leaving her wide open. But if she was acutely susceptible to painting in general, she was fervently and perhaps unwholesomely sensitive to Edmund’s painting in particular, the effect of which she describes in language of increasing intensity: “I turned to look, and lo! it entered me like fire” (2 May 1845); “a blow to the temple was that night sky to me, and I staggered back, gasping for breath” (14 August 1845); “the sweet poison flowed in me, chilling as it warmed” (8 November 1845).