He made his beard flowing on his breast, and, leaning both hands on the
staff of a carpet-broom which Mrs. Parkins had left among my books, said:
‘Benevolence.’
I stood transfixed. The change of sentiment was entirely in the beard.
The man might have left his face alone, or had no face.
The beard did everything.
He lay down, on his back, on my table, and with that action of his head
threw up his beard at the chin.
‘That’s death!’ said he.
He got off my table and, looking up at the ceiling, cocked his beard a
little awry; at the same time making it stick out before him.
‘Adoration, or a vow of vengeance,’ he observed.
He turned his profile to me, making his upper lip very bulky with the
upper part of his beard.
‘Romantic character,’ said he.
He looked sideways out of his beard, as if it were an ivy-bush.
‘Jealousy,’ said he. He gave it an ingenious twist in the air, and
informed me that he was carousing. He made it shaggy with his
fingers—and it was Despair; lank—and it was avarice: tossed it all kinds
of ways—and it was rage. The beard did everything.
‘I am the Ghost of Art,’ said he. ‘Two bob a-day now, and more when it’s
longer! Hair’s the true expression. There is no other. I SAID I’D GROW
IT, AND I’VE GROWN IT, AND IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!’
He may have tumbled down-stairs in the dark, but he never walked down or
ran down. I looked over the banisters, and I was alone with the thunder.
Need I add more of my terrific fate? IT HAS haunted me ever since. It
glares upon me from the walls of the Royal Academy, (except when MACLISE
subdues it to his genius,) it fills my soul with terror at the British
Institution, it lures young artists on to their destruction. Go where I
will, the Ghost of Art, eternally working the passions in hair, and
expressing everything by beard, pursues me. The prediction is
accomplished, and the victim has no rest.