THE PICTURE-MAKERS
“Funny I’ve never been to see your place. I must look you up one day.”
Thus Herbert at uncertain intervals, but he never carried out his
threat. His life was too full, and he had been accustomed from childhood
to have the mountain come to Mohammed. And so, gradually, Matt, who had
at first lived half apprehensive of an exposure, half wishful that
Herbert should become rudely aware of his real position, surrendered
himself to the magnetism of his cousin’s manner, and weakly tried to
live up to that young gentleman’s misconception of him whenever they
were together; even submitting to a morning suit and an evening dress
from Herbert’s tailor for an undefined sum at an unmentioned date. For
if the disadvantages of Herbert’s society were many, if he had to starve
for days to return Herbert’s club hospitality at a restaurant, still he
was satisfied the game was worth the candle. From Herbert he felt
himself acquiring polish and refinement and impeccable English and
social lore; Herbert was an intellectual stimulus, with thoughts to give
away and the newest poets to lend; Herbert was bright and gay, charming
away the vapors of youthful despondency. But, above all, Herbert
sometimes allowed him to work in his studio, amid the sensuous beauty of
draping and decoration and statuary that lapped his artistic nature like
a soft summer sea--a privilege inestimable, but, in view of the mere
model, worth at least all the extra money this friendship cost him. It
befell thus:
On Matt’s second visit Herbert said, good-naturedly:
“I’ve just laid my palette. You sit down. Let’s see what you can do.”
“May I?” cried Matt, eagerly. There was a costume-model on the throne--a
dark-eyed beauty in Oriental drapery.
Herbert relinquished the brush and threw himself upon his back on the
couch, puffing lazily at his cigarette.
“By Jove!” he said, after ten minutes, “you’ve put that in all right.
But what a juicy style you’ve got! Where did you get that from?”
“I can’t do it any other way,” said Matt, apologetically.
“The governor told me you’re under Tarmigan. He never taught you that?”
“No; but that’s the way I’ve always worked. I did a lot of portraits in
Nova Scotia.”
“The devil you did! No wonder you’ve made money, confound you! I thought
you were a blooming ignoramus just come over to learn your pictorial
pothooks and hangers.”
“I thought so, too,” said Matt, flushing with pleasure and modesty.
“None of your sarcasm, you beggar. You can finish the head if you like.”
“Thank you,” said Matt, flutteringly. He felt as if Herbert were heaping
coals of fire upon his own head, repaying his first secret depreciation
by over-generous praise. He painted away bravely, soon losing himself in
the happy travail of execution.
“I must come down to your place and see your work,” said Herbert,
looking up from the volume of Swinburne in which he had immersed
himself.
“Oh, there isn’t much!” said Matt, hastily. “I’ll bring you some little
things next time. Only I don’t want your father to see them--they’re not
for sale.”
“You’re quite right,” said Herbert. “Don’t show ’em to him. Hush!”
“What’s the matter?” asked Matt, turning his head.
“Talk of the--Old Gentleman,” said Herbert.
The brush dropped from the painter’s palsied fingers. He felt like one
caught red-handed. He had already come in, somewhat surreptitiously,
through the side door, in obedience to Herbert’s recommendation, and to
be found using Herbert’s appliances and model would be the acme of
guiltiness.
The alarm was false, but thenceforward “The Old Gentleman” indicated
Matthew Strang the elder. For they had frequent occasion to fear his
advent, since Matt came often, tempted from his gloomy back room to the
beautiful light studio, where he was allowed not only to do bits of
Herbert’s work while Herbert read or gossiped with the model, but
occasionally to set up another easel and use the same model. But they
were only detected together twice by the Vandyke beard and the velvet
coat, and on one occasion Herbert had had time to resume the brush, and
on another to pose Matt as a model.
“The Old Gentleman’s rather grumpy about you,” he admitted, with his
customary candor. “I’ve had to tell the servant not to mention your
coming so often. The mater’s mashed on you, and I suppose he’s a bit
jealous. She wanted to ask you to our dinner-party last night--we had
two Associates, and a Scotch Academician, and an American millionaire
who buys any rot, and an art critic who praises it--but he said one
didn’t give dinner-parties for one’s relations, but for strangers.”
As Matt had already dined once _en famille_, with Madame’s guileless
homage at his side to put him at ease, he did not feel himself hardly
used.
His position with “The Old Gentleman” was not improved by his demeanor
on an occasion when, meeting him in the doorway, Herbert’s father,
instead of raising remonstrant eyebrows, astonished him by asking if he
would like to see the masterpieces he had in stock. Matt did not know
that this generous offer was due to the death of a member of the
Institute whose watercolors had been accumulating on Matthew Strang’s
hands, and who now, even before his funeral, was showing signs of a
posthumous “boom;” he replied eagerly that nothing could be a greater
favor. The picture-dealer waved his jewelled hand with pompous
geniality, and, mounting one flight of stairs, with the hand on Matt’s
shoulder, ushered him into the holy of holies, a chamber religious with
purple curtains and hushed with soft carpets, where the more precious
pictures reposed behind baize veils that for possible purchasers were
lifted with a reverent silence bespeaking a hundred extra guineas. Long
habit of ritual awe made Matthew Strang’s hands pious even before his
nephew.
But his nephew’s expected ecstasies were tempered by unexpected
criticism. In an eminent Academician’s portrait of a lady, Matt pointed
out that the eyes were wrong, that pupils should be round, not squashy,
and that the hot shadows made by the Indian reds under the nose were
inspired by Romney. He questioned the veracity of a landscape by a
costly name, demurring to the light on the under sides of the leaves as
impossible under the conditions depicted; and in a historical
composition by an old English master he found a lack of subtlety in the
legs, and a stringy feeling throughout.
All this wanton depreciation of goods by one who was not even an
interested bargainer galled the picture-dealer, conscious of overflowing
good-nature, and prepared for a natural return in breathless adoration.
So when Matt suggested that in a celebrated picture of a sea-beach the
sea had no fluidity and was falling on the fishermen’s heads, he lost
his temper and cried, sarcastically: “I think you had better open a
school for R.A.’s, young man!”
Matt flushed, feeling he had been impertinent; then his sense of justice
repudiated the rebuke. It was of no use pretending a thing was right
when it wasn’t, he protested. He didn’t profess to get things right
himself, and he only wished he could do anything half as good as the
worst of these pictures. But he did know when he was wrong, even if it
wouldn’t come right for all his sweating and fuming.
“A young man oughtn’t to talk till he can paint,” interrupted his uncle,
severely.
“But you know what Dr. Johnson says, sir,” Matt remonstrated. “If you
can’t make a plum-pudding, it’s no sign you can’t judge one.”
“Plum-puddings and pictures are very different things,” said Matthew
Strang, stiffly, as though insulted by an implicit association with a
pastry-cook.
“My, that’s ripping!” cried Matt, abandoning the argument at the sudden
sight of a fine mellow piece of portrait-painting. “How the Old Masters
got the grays! Oh, why don’t people wear wigs nowadays?”
This outburst of enthusiasm made the private exhibition close more
auspiciously than had seemed probable, but Matt was never again invited
to inspect the sacred treasures. His relations with his relatives came
to be limited to morning visits to Herbert, whose stairs he ascended
half secretly, to watch the progress of his cousin’s studies for an
ambitious picture of “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar,” the models for
which he also used himself. He left his own studies behind at Herbert’s
request--though reluctantly, for he was not at all satisfied with
them--as a species of payment for the privilege. When, through his
interest in this coming masterpiece of Herbert’s, and under the
fascination of this delightful and flattering friendship, he forgot his
pride and fell into the habit of regular morning work in Herbert’s
company, lunch somehow came up regularly for three, though Madame was
not supposed to be aware of his presence. Those were joyous lunches,
full of laughter and levity, made picturesque by the romantic dress or
undress of the third party, and extra palatable for Matt--when his first
reluctance wore off--by the fact that they saved dinners.
“Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” was intended for next year’s Academy,
Herbert told him, and he gathered from his cousin’s casual observations
that it had also to be submitted beforehand to the professors at the
schools, for there were strange cramping conditions as to the size of
the canvas and the principal figure. But he was less interested in its
destination than in its draughtsmanship. He saw the tableau in his
mind’s eye the moment Herbert told him he was engaged upon it, for the
scene had often figured itself to his fancy in those far-off days when
his mother read the Bible to her helpless children by random prickings.
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream was one of the lucky chapters, to which Matt
listened without distraction as the narrative unrolled itself
pictorially before his inner vision. He rapidly sketched his conception,
then found he disliked it, and ultimately remembered he had
unconsciously reproduced the grouping of figures in the illustration in
his mother’s Bible, one of those he had colored in his childish
naughtiness. Herbert protested this was no drawback, but Matt went away
brooding over a more artistic arrangement, and dreamed that he was
mangled by lions in a den. But in the morning he brought a new grouping
for Herbert’s consideration. This Herbert picked to pieces as being
against the canons.
“Don’t forget it’s for the Academy,” he said. “We mustn’t make mistakes
in grammar. Some of the old buffers are worse than Tarmigan.”
“Damn Tarmigan!” cried Matt, but he had to admit ruefully that his
scheme was full of solecisms. He had by this time as full an
acquaintance with the rules as his senior, but with Herbert they had
become instinctive. It was with a renewed sense of inferiority to his
cousin, paradoxically combined with an inward raging against the Lindley
Murrays of art, that Matt abandoned point after point under Herbert’s
searching criticism. Herbert’s gift of pulling other people’s ideas to
pieces amounted to genius. But he abandoned his original sketch also,
dismissed his projected models, and devoted himself to arguing out the
composition afresh.
Under the banter of the art-critic smoking cynically on the sofa, Matt
was put upon his mettle to group all the figures and dispose the lines
so as to escape the pitfalls lurking on every side, and likewise satisfy
the conditions of the pedantic professors.
“We must get as much subject as possible into it,” explained Herbert.
“They give you such a small space--only fifty by forty--that you must
crowd all you know into it.”
Gradually the composition took shape, with infinite discussion, daily
renewed. Matt was for pillars with curious effects of architecture.
Herbert objected that pillars would make the perspective too difficult,
and only consented on the laughing stipulation that Matt should work out
the angles. And Herbert was very averse from Matt’s suggestions of
strange original attitudes for the figures.
“That ’ll make some awfully stiff foreshortening,” he grumbled.
“What does it matter? You’ll have models,” Matt would reply.
“It’s all very well. You haven’t got to do the work,” Herbert would
retort.
And when the grouping was settled, the color and the drapery brought
fresh argumentation, the young men working as at a chess problem till
the puzzle of arriving at the original without deserting the Academic
was solved. And as, in the solution of a chess problem by a pair of
heads, the suggestion of the winning moves has been so obscured by the
indefinite suggestion of abortive moves by both, that neither remembers
to which the final discovery of the right track was due, so Matt would
have been surprised to be told that the ideas that had been retained
were all his, and the ideas that had been rejected were all Herbert’s.
The thought of apportioning their shares in the final scheme never
crossed his mind, even though it was his hand that always held the
experimentative pencil. Indeed, the technical interest of the task had
absorbed every other thought, and the details of the tentative were lost
in the triumph of the achieved, and obscured as by a cigarette cloud of
happy mornings.
And then Herbert told his father he must have new models fresh to
studios.
“I don’t want ’em from Haverstock Hill or Lillie Road,” he said--”women
who’ve been hung in every gallery. I don’t want your Italians from
Hatton Garden, or professionals that any of the other fellows might get
hold of and extract my ideas from. Besides, new faces will give me a
better chance.”
And Matthew Strang the Elder recognized there was some reason in his
son’s request; but he pointed out it was not so easy to go outside the
stock families, especially for figure models, and that old hands often
helped the painter. But Herbert easily overrode his objections. It was
only the conventional attitudinizings and foreshortenings which they
understood, the quotations of art, which he was now about to abandon in
deference to paternal prejudice; and so Matthew Strang, morbidly
solicitous, obediently brought picturesque Orientals for Daniel and the
King and the satraps and the counsellors, and blushing brunettes for the
beauties of the Court; and Herbert set to work to reproduce in large on
the canvas Matt’s rough charcoal scheme of the whole, and his own or
Matt’s studies of the parts; and when Herbert blundered, Matt suggested
with pastel a change of tone or color or outline, sometimes even taking
up the brush when Herbert was lazy--as Herbert often was. Matt was
never surprised to find the work no more advanced than when he had gone
away the morning before, for Herbert’s mind was on many and more
important things. The Academy students were rehearsing a burlesque which
he had written for their dramatic society, and he sometimes slipped out
to the rehearsals, lamenting to Matt that, through his father’s
insistence on steady work, he could not even play in his own piece. The
only recreation allowed him was a ride in the Park on a hired hack, and
even that, he grumbled, was to enable him to salute cantering R.A.’s.
Sometimes he went to tea with the girl students at restaurants.
Sometimes he went to balls, and was too tired on the day after to do
anything but describe them. They were always painters’ dances; “The Old
Gentleman blocks others,” he said. On one occasion the host was an R.A.,
whose son was a fellow-student at the schools, and then “The Old
Gentleman chortled.”
Then there was the students’ ball, to which he convoyed Matt, who was
quite dazzled by the elegance and refinement of the ladies, and almost
afraid to speak to his partners, and torn afresh with envy of the
beautiful life from which he had been, and must long be, shut out; not
losing his discomfort till, after the supper (at which he tasted
champagne for the first time), Herbert’s special circle danced the
Lancers with a zest and _entrain_ that horrified some of the matrons,
and brought back to Matt the dear old nights when he took the barn floor
with little Ruth Hailey, under the placid gaze of the cows and amid the
odors of the stable and the hay-mow.
For other memorable experiences, too, Matt was indebted to his
easy-going cousin. There was Herbert’s club, the Bohemian, a cosey
little place favored by actors and journalists, caricatures of whose
sensuous faces lined the walls in company with oil-paintings and
sketches more sensuous still. Matt felt measureless reverence for the
men he brushed against here. He had seen some of them before in the
illustrated papers which he read in shop-windows or penny news-rooms or
Herbert’s studio, and he trembled lest they should detect, from his
embarrassment amid the varied knives and forks and glasses, that he was
only a boor with less education than the waiters. He wondered what the
clever, cultured people--scraps of whose conversation floated across to
him amid the popping of soda-water corks--would think if they knew he
had planted potatoes, chopped logs, made sugar in the woods, and climbed
masts and steeples. In the new snobbishness with which their society had
infected him he could not see that these things were education, not
humiliation, and he was glad that even Herbert knew little of his
history, and asked less. Of other people’s histories, on the other hand,
Matt heard a great deal. “Bubbles” had robbed him of his belief in royal
virtue; in the smoking-room of the Bohemians society fell to pieces like
a house of cards, in building which, as Herbert once said, the knaves
alone had been used. It was a racing, dicing, drinking, swindling,
fornicating fraternity, worm-eaten with hypocrisy. Sincerity or
simplicity was “all my eye;” there was always money or a woman or
position in the background.
“They talk a lot of scandal,” Matt once complained.
“My dear Matt,” remonstrated Herbert, “it’s not scandal; it’s gossip.
Brixton gossips about who marries whom, Bohemia about who lives with
whom. Scandal implies censure.”
Despite the scandal (or the gossip), Matt was full of curiosity to see
this strange new life of clubs and restaurants and theatres (to which
Herbert sometimes got paper admissions), this feverish realm of
intellect and gayety, where nobody seemed to want for anything; but it
sometimes came over him with an odd flash of surprise and bitterness, as
he caught the gleam of white scented shoulders, or saw heavy-jowled
satyrs swilling champagne, that all this settled luxury had been going
on while he was tramping the snowy roads of what might have been another
planet.
The feeling wore off as the London season advanced, and the tide of
luxurious life rolled along the great sunny thoroughfares, or flecked
the midnight streets with darting points of fire. His Puritan
conscience, curiously persisting beneath all the scepticism engendered
by his mother’s tragedy, had at first acquiesced but uneasily in the
unscriptural view of life that seemed to prevail around him. But
fainter and fainter grew its prickings, the sensuous in him ripened in
this liberal atmosphere, and that Greek conception of a beautiful world
which, budding for him in solitude, had been almost nipped by the same
cruel tragedy, flowered now in the heats of an ardent city.
“The Old Gentleman” was in such good-humor at the surprising progress of
Herbert’s “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” that Madame’s gentle
remonstrance that he ought to do something for Matt touched a responsive
chord, and before the Academy sending-in day Matt had the privilege of
being escorted by his uncle, in company with Herbert, to a
_conversazione_ at the Reynolds Club, of which the dealer was a member.
Herbert was soon lost in the crush of second-rate painters and engravers
and obscurely famous visitors who gathered before the members’ would-be
Academy pictures that lined the walls, or the second-rate entertainers
who struck attitudes on the daïs; but Matt was too nervous amid this
congestion of celebrities to detach himself from his uncle, who did the
honors grandly, pointing out the lions of the club with a proprietorial
air. Matt could not but feel that his uncle (who was of the
swallow-tailed minority) was himself one of the lions of the club, and
in very truth he was its most distinguished-looking member. “The
refreshments are not gratis,” he told Matt, “but of course you can have
anything you like at my expense. Will you have a cup of coffee, or are
you one of those degenerate young men who can’t live without
whiskey-and-water?” But Matt had no appetite for anything; he was too
fluttered by this close contact with the giants of the brush. He
listened eagerly to morsels of their dialogue, strained his vision to
see them through the smoky, lamplit air; critical as he might have been,
and was, before their work, the men themselves were shrouded in a vague
splendor of achievement. They had all been hung.
There seemed a good deal of talk about a virulent article of
comprehensive condemnation in the art columns of the _Saturday
Spectator_; everybody seemed to have read it and nobody to have written
it. For the rest, compliments crossed like smiling couples in the
quadrille.
“What a stunning landscape that is of yours, Rapper!” said Wilfred
Smith, a journalist so ignorant of painting that he was suspected of art
criticism. “Quite like a Corot.”
“Oh, it’s nothing; just knocked off for a color-blind old Johnny who
admires me,” replied Rapper, deprecatingly. He was a moon-faced man with
a double eyeglass on a gold cord. “It’s rotten, really; I’m awfully
ashamed of it.” And he elbowed his way towards it.
“So he ought to be, and so ought you to be ashamed, Wilfred,” said
Morrison, the poet of pessimism and music-halls. “It’s just like those
splashes of silvery gray they sell for Corots on the Boulevards.”
“That’s what I meant,” said Wilfred. “Didn’t you see I was guying him?
Hullo, Clinch, I’ve been admiring that water-color of yours. What an
exquisite face the girl has!”
“It isn’t a water-color, you ---- fool; it’s a pastel,” said Clinch,
gruffly.
“That’s what I meant--not an oil-color,” replied Wilfred, unabashed.
Matt stared with interest at the picture, which was just beside him. The
face was indeed exquisite with the peculiar delicacy of pastel. He
looked at the painter’s own face, coarse and splotched, the teeth fouled
by endless tobacco. It was as though Pan should paint Psyche.
“I see the _Saturday Spectator_ doesn’t understand your ‘Carolina,’
Clinch,” said the poet, smiling.
Clinch damned the _Saturday Spectator_ in a string of unlovely oaths,
which were drowned by the music of a violin and a piano. He did not care
a twopenny damn what people scribbled about him; his pictures were
there, just the same.
“But what does ‘Carolina’ mean, old man?” said the poet, appealingly.
Clinch replied that literary fellows were invariably sanguinary fools
who fancied that painting meant things and could be explained in words.
He had just been reading about the significance of Leonardo’s
backgrounds in some rotten book on the Renaissance. In reality those
bits of landscape must have been put in and painted out a dozen times
before Leonardo had struck the color-harmony he tried after. Morrison
retorted, that if the art-critic could paint he would become a partisan,
tied to his own talent. As it was, he could approach other men’s
pictures without prejudice.
“But also without knowledge,” Clinch replied, goaded. He pointed out
brutally that to learn painting meant to learn a new set of symbols. “If
you wanted to paint that lamp,” he said, “you’d probably put down a----
line to get that edge, and so lose all the---- softness. A real line
wouldn’t look a---- bit like the real thing. Same with color; real red
wouldn’t give red. Painting is all subterfuge, optical illusion. Color
and form are only an affair of relations.”
He went on to explain, with punctilious profanities, that to study the
relation of that lamp to the piano-lid was enough for a picture; treated
perfectly, there would be a poetry and mystery about it. Beauty, too,
was only an affair of relations, and in “Carolina” he had been trying to
get a beautiful relation between two ugly things, and an early Georgian
feeling into a nineteenth-century interior, with a scientific accuracy
of tones known only to modern French art.
Matt listened eagerly, wincing a little at the livelier oaths, but
conscious of piquant perspectives, of novel artistic vision, which, if
not quite intelligible, was in refreshing contrast with Tarmigan’s
old-fashioned orthodoxy.
“But you had the same woman in your picture of the ‘Salvation Lass,’”
persisted the poet.
Clinch explained that if writing chaps knew what it was to hunt for a
satisfactory model, they’d thank their stars they didn’t know a palette
from a planchette. A “swell woman” that really expressed your idea you
couldn’t get to sit for you, and if you could get her you couldn’t swear
at her. Besides, it was his ambition to create a new type of feminine
beauty, and impose her on his period--_une femme de Clinch_! Wilfred
Smith took mental notes, prepared henceforward to expound Clinch to an
ignorant world.
“It’s about time he got a new model, anyway,” he said, when the
repulsive-looking artist had moved off.
“Or painted her,” added Morrison, dryly.
Matt had a flash of resentment. The picture was to him a dainty dream of
cool color and graceful form. Despite his association with Herbert, he
did not yet understand the temperament that strides to Wit over Truth’s
body.
“Isn’t it funny a man like that should draw such refined women?” he
could not help remarking to his cicerone.
Matthew Strang assumed an oracular expression. “Art’s just a knack,” he
said. “You’ve got to be born with it. I wasn’t, more’s the pity; but
Herbert makes up for it, thank Heaven! Art’s got nothing to do with
character. I’ve paid many a man to do me so many easel-pictures a year,
and do you suppose I ever got them? The rogues get drunk or die or
something, but they never come up to time.”
Matt was puzzled. If Art demanded anything, it seemed to him it was
steadfastness and sobriety. The truth about it seemed to lie in those
lines he had read in a volume of Matthew Arnold, borrowed from Herbert:
“Young, gay,
Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.”
A sudden fear that he was not a genius himself was like a vivisector’s
knife through his heart, laying bare with painful incision its secret
hope.
“Do you think Clinch gets his effects without bothering?” he asked, with
anxiety.
“O heavens! no,” said Matthew Strang, authoritatively. “I once watched
him at work. He was squatted on a tiny stool, looking up at his picture,
and painting upward. He had a cigarette in his mouth, which he was
always relighting. Every now and then he would sigh heavily, or swear at
himself or his model, and sometimes he would go and lie on the
hearth-rug and stare solemnly at the canvas; then jump up, give one
touch, swear if it went wrong, paint it out, and then go and stand in
the corner with his face to the wall, probably in meditation, but
looking exactly like a naughty little boy at school.”
Matt smiled, half at the picture of Clinch in the corner, half from
relief at finding that even men who swore and drank far more than he
did suffered quite as acutely in the parturition of the Beautiful. He
fell back on the theory of an essential inner delicacy behind the
occasionally coarse envelope of artistic genius, just as grossness could
lurk beneath a gentlemanly refinement.
They ultimately found Herbert in the billiard-room, with a cue in one
hand and a “soda-and-whiskey” in the other. “I don’t want to look at the
pictures,” he protested. “If they’re decent I’ll see them in the
Academy, and if they’re rot it’s waste of time seeing them at all. As
for the entertainment, you can get a better at any music-hall--at least,
so I’ve been told.” Nevertheless, he himself took Matt to another
_conversazione_ the same week, the far more homely gathering of the St.
George’s Sketching Club, where the refreshments _were_ gratis and
evening dress was taboo, and really famous people scrambled for the
bread-and-cheese and beer, of which there was not enough, and members
disported themselves in their models’ costumes for the edification of a
company which had turned its back on their pictures. For the Academy
itself Matt paid his shilling, into such extravagant habits had he
slipped since the days of his arrival in London, when a National Gallery
catalogue was beyond his far fatter purse. But he came away much less
inspired than from that momentous visit, his imagination untouched, save
once or twice, as by Erle-Smith’s personalized projections of mediæval
romance, in which the absence of real atmosphere seemed only natural.
There were so many smooth portraits of uninteresting people that he was
reminded drearily of his Nova-Scotian drudgery, when his heaven-scaling
spirit had to stoop to portray and please some tedious farmer who was
sometimes not even picturesque. It did not occur to him how unfair was
the latent comparison with the National Gallery; he forgot that Art is
short and the Academy long, that one can no more expect a batch of great
pictures every year than a batch of great novels or of great symphonies.
Tarmigan had a picture of “The Rape of the Sabines.” It was hung on the
line, and Grainger’s was very proud of it. In the discussion on the
Academy (which supplied the class with the materials for a fortnight’s
carping) it was the only picture that escaped even “Bubbles’s”
depreciation, though he declared he would never himself paint like that,
which the curly-headed wag eagerly admitted. One of the students had
secured a place in the “skies,” and his success made Matt regret he
himself had not dared to send in.
Grainger’s own contribution had been rejected, which made his pupils
think more highly of themselves.
Matt was more interested in the Azure Art Gallery, a little exhibition
(mainly of landscapes with violet shadows) held by some young men about
whom Herbert was enthusiastic; for they did not attempt, said he, to vie
either with the camera or the conte. “If painting be an art at all,” he
contended, “it can only be so by virtue of ignoring Nature. As Goethe
said, ‘We call art Art because it is not Nature.’ The musician works up
notes, the poet syllables into a music unlike anything in Nature, and so
must the painter work up Nature’s colors and forms under the sole
guidance of his artistic instinct. And whatever can be better expressed
in words has no place in painting. These young men’s pictures tell no
stories, and no truths either. They are merely concerned with color and
line.”
Matt afterwards found that, with the exception of a couple of Scotchmen,
these young men by no means accepted Herbert’s account of their aims;
indeed, they rather regarded it as satirical, for to give truer
impressions of Nature was precisely their boast and glory. Although Matt
could not always credit them with success in this, still he found a note
of life and fantasy in their work. He was especially struck by
Cornpepper’s “Chimney on Fire in Fitzroy Street”--a flight of sparks
falling and curving in a golden rain, in vivid contrast with the dark,
starlit sky above and the black mass of spectators below, faintly
illumined by street-lamps, and broken at the extreme end by the brassy
gleam of the fire-engine tearing up the street. There were inaccuracies
of detail, but Matt was immensely impressed by the originality of the
subject and the touch of weirdness, and it was with joy that he accepted
Herbert’s offer to take him to the Azure Art Club, where Cornpepper and
his clique mostly forgathered. Since Herbert had misinterpreted them to
his cousin, Matt had read a good deal about them in the papers, and
they had held forth brilliantly to interviewers on the veracity of their
rendering of Nature, Cornpepper going so far as to claim that you could
not look at his landscapes without feeling--from the color of stone and
sea, from the tints of the sky and the disposition of the clouds--what
o’clock it was. Whereupon the interviewer had consulted a study of
poppies on a cliff, and reported that it was half-past eleven,
Cornpepper crying “Correct!” All of which did not fail to provoke
counterblasts from the Academic camp and from the irresponsible
concocters of facetious paragraphs.
It was all very small--the feeble British refraction of the great Gallic
battle then waging, of the campaign of plein air and modern subject
against bituminous landscapes and classic conventions, the expurgated
English edition of the eternal battle of youth and age, spiritless as
the bouts of boxers in a Quaker land, _sans_ prize-rings or
hero-worshippers; the shadowy warfare of art in a Puritan country
vibrating only to politics and religion, indifferent to style, gauging
literature merely by its message and art by its idea.
But Matt was not a true-born Briton, and his own aversion from an unreal
Nature doctored and tricked up, in which an artificial chiaroscuro took
the place of observation and atmosphere, led him into instant sympathy
with this painting of “real moments,” with this presentation of “Nature
caught in the fact,” as Cornpepper brilliantly defined the Impressionism
he had smuggled over from Paris. Even if Nature was not so violet as she
was painted, Matt felt the mistake was on the right side. And who but
Cornpepper had revealed and interpreted the mystery and poetry of the
night? True, he was rather staggered to remember, it was impossible to
paint the night with your eye on the object. The night side of Nature
might be caught in the fact; it could not be arrested in the fact.
Herbert was not a member of the Azure Art Club; they had to call on a
man in Kensington to get him to take them there. He proved to be no
other than the moon-faced Rapper, whom Herbert had invited to invite
them to dinner.
“He’s an awful duffer,” he said, enviously, “but he has a flat of his
own and an income of his own, and he’s had the run of Copenhagen,
Paris, and Antwerp. They say Copenhagen is worse than Paris.”
Rapper made them stay to admire his rooms. “Don’t look at my pictures,”
he said; “that’s only a portrait I’m doing of Riggs, the bucket-shop
keeper. I’m an awful duffer; why I should get so many commissions at a
hundred and fifty guineas when there’s lots of geniuses starving, I
never can make out. I suppose it’s because I don’t want the money--I
shall only blue it at Monte Carlo. I’ve only just come back from the
country--a J.P., an awful screw. He made me do him and his wife for
two-fifty. Still, they’re only half-lengths. Do try some of this
Burgundy; it’s genuine. I import it direct from a small grower. I get a
huge barrel for five pounds, and pay three pounds duty, and get hundreds
of bottles out of it. People don’t know how to get wine in England. Oh,
do please look at that Limoges enamel over the mantel-piece, Mr. Strang;
it’s far better worth looking at than that daub of a library.”
“I always prefer to look at pictures,” said Matt, apologetically.
“It _is_ rather a strong bit of color,” admitted Rapper.
“Yes. Do you think the light is accounted for?” asked Matt. “That red
glow--”
“Don’t you see the library lamp?” rejoined Rapper.
“Yes, but the shade’s off; and even then, isn’t it more like firelight?”
“Not a bit of it!” replied Rapper, hotly. “Do you suppose I didn’t study
the effects with a lighted lamp? That’s a good bit of action in the old
scholar’s arm, reaching for the book.”
Matt examined it carefully.
“The forearm is a little out of drawing, isn’t it--a little too long?”
he asked, timidly.
“My dear fellow, the model had an unusually long forearm. You don’t
suppose everybody is alike. Of course it isn’t near finished yet. But
really I was trying for color more than for line; and, after all, it’s
the careless draughtsmanship of a man who can draw. It attracted quite a
lot of notice at the Azure Art Gallery last year, but I put a big price
on it, so that it shouldn’t sell, and I’d have time to work it up.
That’s a little bust of myself; it’s only plaster of Paris bronzed
over. I model ever so much better than I paint, but nobody will give me
a commission. Isn’t it funny? Do have some more of the Burgundy. I’m not
much of an artist, but I flatter myself I do know a good wine.”
Before they left he presented them with photographs of his library
picture, apparently forgetting that he hadn’t near finished it.
“I say, I can’t go about with you if you go on like this,” whispered
Herbert to Matt, as Rapper lingered to extinguish his gas and lock his
door. “Fancy telling a chap his faults. You mustn’t go by me and my
Nebuchadnezzar. I rather like to be pitched into. It keeps a fellow from
getting conceited.”
“I didn’t know,” Matt murmured, with a new admiration for Herbert, who
had already become a hero to him, moving so brilliantly amid all these
shining circles. The three young men got into a hansom and smoked
Rapper’s cigars. At the little club, which was only ten minutes off,
they dined in a long, narrow, drab-painted room, with a billiard-table
near the door. Several men, whose work Matt had studied with interest,
were dining in their vicinity. Matt strained his ears to catch their
conversation, but it seemed to be all about the billiard-table, an
apparently recent acquisition. At last, to his joy, he was introduced to
some of the most famous--to Butler, tall, dark, muscular, and
frock-coated, most erratic of etchers, most slap-dash of painters; to
the foul-mouthed, dainty-fingered Clinch; to Gurney, slim, youthful, and
old-faced, habited in tweeds, the latest recruit, an earnest disciple of
every master in turn, old or new, always in superlatives of eulogy or
abuse, and untaught by his own gyrations to respect a past adoration or
to tone down a present; to Greme, more barefacedly boyish than even
Herbert, a blonde youth credited by his admirers with a charming new
blond vision of Nature, though the Philistines contended that all he did
was to get water-color effects with oils; to Simpson, who ground his own
colors, and had mysterious glazes and varnishes, and was consumed by an
unshared anxiety as to the permanence of his pictures; and--oh, awful
joy!--to the great Cornpepper, the most brilliant and the youngest of
them all, a squat, juvenile figure, with a supercilious eye-glass in the
right eye, a beak-like nose, and a habit of rasping the middle of his
seat with his hands, like an owl on a perch. Matt was dying to talk to
them--and especially to Cornpepper--of their art; as to men who had
already done something in the world through which they moved, burdened
with aspirations and haloed with dreams. But the talk would not veer
round to painting, and the evening was entirely devoted to a general
game of shell-out with halfpenny points. Matt was drawn into taking a
cue, and lost one and threepence halfpenny in the first game, his
inexperience being aggravated by Herbert’s whispered caution not to cut
the cloth. However, his skilled eye and hand, practised with gun and
brush, soon told, and he won his money back in the second, much to his
relief, for his funds were running away at an appalling rate. The
strenuous leaders of the newest art movement relaxed over the green
table, highly hilarious as the white ball ran among the red balls like a
sheep-dog, to drive them into the pockets, and stamping and contorting
themselves in mock applause after a failure to score.
“That’s a fluke!” Herbert would say when the failure was his, and the
jest became a catchword provocative of perpetual cachinnation.
There were so many hands in the game that Matt had plenty of time for
occasional remarks between his turns, but nobody would speak of art
except a venerable graybeard named Brinkside, who talked to him
enthusiastically of the Azure Art campaign. He told him of the heroism
of its leaders: of how Cornpepper had lived on dates and water while
doing black-and-white illustrations for the _Christian Home_, salvation
subjects at starvation prices; of how the even sturdier Butler had slept
in a stable-loft, refusing to compromise with his genius or to modify
the great dabs of paint that the world mistook for daubs. In answer to
Matt’s inquiries, the old man explained to him how Cornpepper painted
his night scenes, by putting down at fever heat in the morning some
beautiful effect noted and absorbed the night before. In the evening
Cornpepper would return to the spot, Brinkside said; but if, despite all
his waiting, he could not see the same effect, he would wilfully forget
the second impression, and return again and again till the first
conditions were repeated. Matt, relieved to find that Cornpepper’s
method was similar to his own, and that genius had no esoteric
prerogatives of method, pointed out that in Nature’s infinite
permutations an effect never recurred exactly as before, and that,
therefore, he, for his part, contented himself with storing up in his
mind the main values and color-planes, relying on deduction for the
minutiæ. But, of course, it all depended on holding the total effect,
the original sensation, vividly in the memory. On leaving he thanked
Brinkside with touching humility for the instructive interest of his
conversation.
“Funny to find an old man in a new movement,” he observed, suddenly, to
Herbert, in their homeward hansom.
“Why not? Old men often creep in. It’s their last chance. But if it’s
Brinkside you’re thinking of, he’s not an artist at all. He’s an
artists’ colorman, who supplied ’em with their materials on tick before
they caught on. Brinkside’s like a dress-maker I used to know at
Brighton, who financed lovely woman till she married wealthy flats. He
foresaw they would get on, and, by Jove, they are blazing away like a
house on fire, or, perhaps I ought to say, like a chimney on fire.”
“Then the opposition to the Academy is flourishing!” cried Matt,
joyfully. His vague, youthful sympathy with all that was fresh and young
was strengthened and made concrete by the revelations of struggle and
starvation in the lives of those that had preceded him, martyred for the
faith that was in them.
“Yes, it is flourishing,” said Herbert; “so much so that in ten years’
time most of ’em will be Academicians or Associates. If I were the
governor I’d buy ’em up now; but he’s got no insight.”
“Oh,” said Matt, disappointed. “Do you mean the Academy will win, after
all?”
“Six of one and half a dozen of t’other. They’ll be half accepted and
half toned down. Already Greme and Butler are married--and that’s the
beginning of the end. Lucky beggars! supplied with enthusiasm in their
youth, and comfort in their old age. I wish I was young myself.”
“What nonsense!”
“I never was young,” said Herbert, shaking his head. “I always saw
through everything. Heigho! Give us a light from your cigar. I’ve sighed
mine out.”
“I suppose they’re very grateful to Brinkside,” said Matt, when the fire
of Herbert’s cigar was rekindled.
“They play billiards with him, but I don’t suppose they’ve squared up
yet.”
“But they’re making money now,” urged Matt, horrified. Years of bitter
slavery to domestic liabilities had unfitted him to understand this
laxity of financial fibre.
“And then? Why be rash? One can’t foresee the future.”
Before the magnificence of this rebuke Matt shrank abashed; he had a
sneaking twinge of shame and concern for his own homely honesty, as for
something inauspiciously inartistic.
“Talking of money,” went on Herbert, “I’m devilish hard up myself for a
day or two--bills to meet at once, and my allowance don’t come due for a
few days. You couldn’t advance me a trifle, I suppose?”
“Of course I could,” said Matt, eagerly.
“Do you think you could let me have a pony?”
“A pony?” repeated Matt, mystified.
“Twenty-five pounds. Don’t do it if it will at all inconvenience you.”
Matt was glad that it was too dark for Herbert to read his face. The sum
was by far the greater portion of his worldly possessions. But he did
not hesitate. Herbert would refund it in a day or two.
“I will bring it to the studio to-morrow,” he said.
“That’s a good chap,” said Herbert. “By-the-way, we’ve got to go to
Cornpepper’s studio next Sunday week.”
“Really?” cried Matt, in delighted excitement.
“Yes; he told me he didn’t like to ask you direct, because you looked so
serious and strait-laced.”
“Oh!” protested Matt, with a vague sense of insult.
“Well, you do, there’s no denying it. Remember how you preached to me
about the governor the first time you saw me. Perhaps you’ll go
lecturing Cornpepper because he economizes by domesticating his model
when he has a big picture on the easel. Personally, I like Cornpepper;
he is the only fellow who has the courage of his want of principles in
this whitewashed sepulchre of a country. But be careful that you don’t
talk to him as you did to Rapper, for he lives up to his name. He is
awfully peppery when you tread on his corns, though he has no objection
to stamping on yours. Not that I believe there’s any real malice in him,
but they say his master at the Beaux-Arts was a very quarrelsome fellow,
and my opinion is that he models himself on him, and thinks that to
quarrel with everybody is to be a great artist.”
“Oh, but don’t you think he _will_ be a great artist?” said Matt.
“He _is_ a great artist, but he won’t be,” said Herbert. “He’ll be an
R.A. By Jove! we nearly ran over that Guardsman. Mary Ann has been
standing him too many drinks. Do you know the price of a Guardsman,
Matt?”
“The price?”
“Yes; a nurse-maid who wishes to be seen walking out with a swagger
soldier has to give him half a crown and his beer.”
Herbert never lost an opportunity of showing off to Matt his knowledge
of the inner working of the great social machine. Madame, passing her
white hand lovingly over her boy’s hair, had no idea of the serpentine
wisdom garnered in the brain beneath.
At the Marble Arch, Matt, carefully bearing the photograph of Rapper’s
“Library,” got out of the hansom to exchange to a ’bus which passed near
his street. He offered to pay his share of the hansom, but Herbert waved
the silver aside with princely magnificence.