In a small way, we all of us commit that man's mistake of thinking that the life of our dear ones is in an image, instead of in the heartbeats which the image--like a name, a place, any associated thing--can produce in ourselves. And only changing things can answer to our changing self; only living creatures live with us. Once learned by heart, the portrait, be it never so speaking, ceases to speak, or we to listen to its selfsame message. What was once company to us, because it awakened a flickering feeling of wished-for presence, becomes, after a time, mere canvas or paper; disintegrates into mere colours or mere black and white. Even the faithfullest among us are utterly faithless to the best-beloved portraits. We have them on our walls or on our writing-tables, and pack and unpack some of them for every journey. But do we look at them? or, looking, do we see them, feel them?
They are not, however, useless; very far from it. You might as well complain of the uselessness of the fire which is burned out, or the extinguished lamp. They have, though for a brief time, pleased, perhaps even consoled, us--warmed our heart with the sense of a loving nearness, shed a light on the visions in our mind. Hence we should cherish them as useful delusions, or rather realities, so long as they awaken a reality of feeling. And 'tis a decent instinct of gratitude, not mere inertness, which causes us to keep them, honoured pensioners of our affections, in honourable places.
Only one thing we should guard against, and act firmly about, despite all sentimental scruples. During the _period of activity_ of a portrait--I mean while we still, more or less, look at it--we must beware lest it take, in our memory, the place of the original. Those unchanging features have the insistence of their definiteness and permanence, and may insidiously extrude, exclude, the fleeting, vacillating outlines of the remembered reality. And those alone concern our heart, and have a right to occupy our fancy. One feels aghast sometimes, on meeting some dear friend after an interval of absence, to find that those real features, that real expression, are not the familiar ones. It is the portrait, the envious counterfeit presentment, which (knowing its poor brief reign) has played us and our friend that mean trick. When this happens we must be merciless, like the fairy-story prince when the wicked creatures in the wood spoke to him in the voice of his mother; piety towards the original arms us with ruthlessness towards the portrait. It was for this same reason that, as I have said, I unpinned from my screen those two facsimiles of drawings, feeling rather a brute while I was doing so.