A SYMPOSIUM
Matt’s desire to hear the brotherhood of the brush on Art was gratified
_ad nauseam_ at Cornpepper’s, for a batch of artists of all ages,
together with a couple of journalists, assembled in the big, bare,
picture-littered studio to smoke their own pipes and to say “when” to
the neat-handed model who dispensed the host’s whiskey. Some declared
they wanted it neat, to take off the effects of a grewsome tale with
which Rapper had started the evening. It was about the time when he had
studied art in Berlin and attended Ringschneider’s anatomy class. (“I’m
not much of an artist, but I do know anatomy,” he interpolated.) One day
when the corpse upon which the professor was about to demonstrate was
uncovered, the students recognized, to their horror, a favorite
fellow-pupil, who had been away for a few days. He had been taken ill in
his garret, conveyed to the hospital, and, being alone in the world, had
been sold to the lecture-room. The startled class immediately subscribed
for another corpse, and buried the unfortunate boy with due honors.
Greme tried to counteract this tale by another one about a model, an old
fellow named William Tell, who, after vainly applying at the Slade and
Lambeth schools for work, had been taken up by the St. George’s
Sketching Club for the sake of his picturesque corded breeches. When, at
the end of the two hours’ spell, the men were criticising one another’s
work, one said to another, “There doesn’t seem any leg under those
breeches.” Overhearing which, William Tell fell to indignantly
unbuttoning his gaiters.
The arrival of a twinkling-eyed caricaturist, joyously greeted by all as
“Jimmy,” dispelled the last flavors of the mortuary. “Aren’t you in
China?” everybody asked. Jimmy explained he had thrown up the
commission, but was off to the West Indies next month, though he
expected to find himself in Paris instead. He was a genius, with an
infinite capacity for taking pains and making friends, and, being forced
to rise in the small hours to get through his work before the countless
callers arrived to distract him, was popularly supposed to be an idle
scapegrace, who produced sketches as rapidly and copiously as the
conjurer produces oranges from his coat-sleeve. Matt’s breath was almost
taken away in a rush of reverence and rapture at the unexpected
privilege of seeing him; for, despite his own craving for the Sublime
and the Beautiful, Jimmy Raven’s sketches of low London life had for him
a magnetic appeal whose strength surprised himself. Sometimes he fancied
it was the humor and the fun that held him, as being the qualities in
which he himself was most deficient; sometimes it flashed upon him
obscurely--as in a light thrown through a fog--that Jimmy Raven was
teaching him to see the spectacle of life more deeply and truthfully
through the medium of his humorous vision; at such instants he almost
thought one of Jimmy’s loafers worth a whole Academy of poetic myths,
but he suppressed the suspicion as absurd and perturbing to his own
ideals and vision, telling himself it was only the truth and subtlety of
the draughtsmanship that he admired. He listened to him now as eagerly
and deferentially as to Cornpepper, his eyes fixed mainly on these two
famous faces, as if to seize the secret of their gifts in some contour
of nose or chin; but he had ample curiosity and respect to spend even on
the other men, though below all his real modesty and diffidence was a
curious bed-rock of self-conscious strength, as of a talent that might
hope one day to be recognized even of these.
But there was little art-talk to be got out of Jimmy. Having likewise
said “when,” he launched into an account of an East End girl he had
sketched that morning in the Park, and quoted her idea of a coster
gentleman. “My brother’s a toff,” he had overheard her boasting. “He
wears three rows of buttons down his trousers, and sixteen wentilation
’oles in ’is ’at.” “And who do you think I saw in the Park?” he went on.
“Egyptian Bill.”
“No?” cried various voices. “What was he preaching?”
“Buddhism,” said Jimmy. “He’s sitting to Winkelman, that old chap who
became a Buddhist when he was painting those Eastern things the critics
made such a fuss about.”
There was a laugh at the expense of the Mohammedan model, who always
suited his religion to his employer’s.
“When I did him,” said Jimmy, “I pretended to be a Jew, and it was great
fun after he became a Jew to tell him I was a Christian.... I don’t know
which was the biggest lie,” he added, with his droll twinkle.
“Did you hear about the Hindoo who went to see Winkelman’s things at
Dowdeswell’s?” said Butler. “He spat out. You see, he knew the real
thing.” He smiled with grim satisfaction, for the things were licked
and stippled into a meretricious poetry, and his own bold blobs of
Oriental color had been laughed at.
“Don’t you wish they supplied spittoons at the Academy?” asked Jimmy.
It was the red rag. For the next ten minutes the absurdities of the
Academy and the transcendent merits of the Salon (which most of them had
run over to Paris to see) occupied the tapis, and then a spectacled
Scotchman, who answered to the name of Mack, dilated upon the decadence
of the grisette and the degeneracy of the students’ orgies.
“Ah, but still Paris stands for the joy of life,” said Cornpepper. “They
are not ashamed of living.”
“They ought to be,” said Matt, and the company laughed, as at a good
joke.
“Our young friend thinks the artist should be moral,” said Herbert,
paternally.
“He’ll say art should be moral next,” said Mack.
“It isn’t immoral, is it?” said Matt, feebly. As usual, he was half
fascinated, half shocked by the freedom of the artistic standpoint, for
which his intellect was ready, but not his deeper organization. He
wondered again why he was so uncomfortably constructed, and he envied
these others for whom their art seemed to flow in happy irrelation to
conduct and character, or at least to the moral ideals of the bourgeois.
He marvelled at them, too, not understanding how talents more
subconscious than his own could lie in closed compartments, as it were,
of the artists’ minds, apparently unaffected by the experiences of their
temporary owners.
“Art’s neither moral nor immoral,” pronounced the little host,
magisterially, as he grasped his perch more tightly, “any more than it’s
lunar or calendar. The artist thinks and feels in line and color. He
sees Nature green or gray, according to his temperament. There are as
many views from Richmond Hill as there are artists. If two views are
alike, one is a plagiarism. Nature will never be exhausted, for every
man sees her differently.”
“And so long as he doesn’t see her double--” put in Jimmy.
“Quite so,” said Cornpepper. “So long as he isn’t too drunk to keep his
brush steady, we ask no more of him. In fact, it’s always best to be in
love with your sitter--that’s what gives _chic_.”
“Rot!” said a granite-faced, white-bearded septuagenarian who had been
smoking in silent amusement. “_Chic_ comes merely from painting with
brushes too large for the work.”
“Avast there, Rocks!” said Jimmy. “We don’t want any of your
revolutionary notions here. What would you say if we denounced jammy
shadows at the Academy dinner?”
“Avast yourself!” cried Cornpepper, rather angrily. “This is Liberty
Hall. I won’t be classed with the new school, or with any school.”
Cornpepper’s success had already made him feel the dead-weight of an
extravagant school with which one is confounded. “Because I exhibit with
you chaps, people credit me with all your views. You might as well say I
agree with the president because I’m on the line in the Academy.”
“Have you got a picture in the Academy, Teddy? I didn’t notice it,” said
Wilfred Smith, the journalist, thereby expressing what was in Matt’s
mind too.
“There you are!” laughed Rocks. “When you come among us you’re lost.
It’s only by our rejecting you that we make you famous. When you exhibit
by yourselves, you stand out.”
“I allow Rocks to talk,” said little Cornpepper, with a good-natured
smile. “He was the first to detect my talent, and I am really sorry to
be the last to detect his. I think his big nudes are shocking. He and
Tarmigan are a pair. Where is the point of painting heathen mythology?”
“I only paint the nude because I can’t paint clothes,” said Rocks,
smiling. “You are all so versatile nowadays.”
“Ah, Teddy’ll come round to the classic, too, one day,” said Butler,
with a weary expression on his strong, stern face. “You should have seen
his joy when he got the invitation for varnishing-day.”
“Nothing of the sort,” cried little Cornpepper, glaring through his
eye-glass and humping himself into a more owl-like curve. “I didn’t even
accept the invitation. I wasn’t going to help the R.A.’s to correct
their draughtsmanship.” The glare relaxed under his pleasure at the
laugh, and he added, more quietly: “Do let us drop shop, for Heaven’s
sake. I’m not one of a school--I’m myself. And I don’t say salvation
lies with any sect. Give me style; that’s all I ask for.”
“Will you have it neat?” murmured Jimmy.
“Style, not school,” pursued Cornpepper, pleased with the phrase. “Take
literature! There’s style in Boccaccio, and style in Flaubert, and style
in Wycherley. Even a moral work may pass if it has style--Pope’s
satires, for instance. So, too, in painting. I don’t find style in
Bouguereau or Fred Walker, in Rocks or Tarmigan, who are only fit for
chromos, but I do find it in Mantegna, in Fortuny, in Degas, in--”
“Good-bye!” said Jimmy, getting up. “I have to meet my wife at ten.”
“Oh, there’s lots of time,” said Cornpepper. “Carrie, pass Jimmy the
whiskey. Sit down, there’s a good chap.” And Jimmy sat down.
“Style’s going to be a square touch and a feathery outline,” said Greme,
sarcastically.
“Style’s merely a decorative appearance,” said Mack. “A picture is
primarily a wall-decoration; it has no right to exist for itself.”
“Hear, hear!” cried Herbert. Mack lived up to his principles, for he
always saw Nature as a pretty pattern.
“Style’s an accident; look at the blottesque effects you get in
water-color,” said Rocks.
“The last and greatest art--the art to blot,” quoted Levison, the second
journalist, who also posed as a war-artist in times of peace.
“When I was in Antwerp, under Villat,” said Rapper--”a fierce little man
he was--he used to come and correct our canvases with big blotches of
burnt sienna and lamp-black on the last day of a model. Rocks would call
that a blottesque effect. Now I flatter myself _I_ can tell you what
style is, though I don’t profess to get it myself. Style is--”
“The art of leaving in--or leaving out--accidents,” finished Rocks. “You
see that so well in Fortuny’s work.”
“Jimmy gets his effects by leaving out all the dead lines of his first
sketch,” said Wilfred Smith, the journalist; “don’t you, Jimmy?”
“So I’m told,” said Jimmy.
“Style _is_ the art of leaving out,” said Herbert. “They don’t leave out
the R.A.’s pictures in the Academy. Hence the absence of style in the
show.”
“Tut, tut, tut! Shop again!” cried Cornpepper, despairingly. “The only
chance of progress for art is in neglecting values--not from ignorance,
like the Germans, but from intention; not viewing Nature through a bit
of black glass, like Millet, or toning down the violets of her shadows,
but painting real sunlight.”
“But you can’t really paint sunlight,” put in Matt, timidly. “Paint’s
only mud.”
“Quite so,” said Cornpepper. “But Delacroix said, ‘Give me mud, and I’ll
paint you the skin of Venus.’ It depends on what you put round your
mud.”
“Or how you put it on,” added Gurney. “The only way is to get optics to
help you, and mix your primaries on the canvas, not on the palette, with
a Bright’s brush.”
“I reckon you’ll be breaking out in ‘spots’ next,” laughed Rocks. “That
_Vibriste_ nonsense has been the ruin of young Dircks. He used to be
quite second-rate, but since he crossed the Channel he squeezes his
tubes on to his canvas, and it’s all streaks like a clown’s face.”
“Paint is neither mud nor sunlight,” interposed Butler, authoritatively.
“It’s paint. Glory in it. Don’t pretend it’s silk or wood. According to
the Academy, the highest art is to conceal paint.”
“Shop again!” groaned Cornpepper. “We’re an awfully narrow set, we
artists--always girding at each other’s methods, though we’re all trying
for the same thing.” Then, recalled by Butler’s frowning face to a sense
of his position as _chef d’école_, a position he was not yet prepared to
abdicate, he added, in more conciliatory accents: “All I object to in
the Academy is its existence. No body of men has the right to say to the
public, _L’art, c’est moi_. I don’t for a moment claim our work’s better
than theirs, only--”
“That theirs is worse than ours,” suggested Jimmy.
“It’s all very well, but their ideal is smooth things,” persisted
Butler, vehemently. “Smooth things in paint, in life, and in
after-dinner speeches. I should have taken the Gold Medal in my year,
and been spared years of grinding misery, if I had scraped out the life
with a fish-shell or a razor-blade.”
Matt’s eyes flashed sympathetic admiration at him.
“Bother the Academy!” said Herbert, hastily. “Pass me the jug.”
“Schools of Arts are barracks,” went on Butler, his resentment
unexhausted. “They would fuse all talents in one mould, and put together
what God has put asunder. You may teach craft; but Art--never!”
“The idea of setting a subject, too,” said Greme, who was very proud of
his private color-vision. “They go on a false analogy. Art can’t be got
at by a competitive examination. It isn’t like Latin or Greek, or the
use of the globes; it’s the expression of individual temperament. And
it’s always such a rotten, stilted subject they set for the Gold Medal.
I wonder what it is this year?”
“Strang’s at the Academy,” said Rapper. “He’ll tell you.”
“Oh, confound the Academy!” said Herbert, crossly.
“Something Biblical, you bet your boots,” said Jimmy. “It makes the
fellows read the Bible, anyhow. But I must really go and meet my wife.”
“I heard it was about Nebu--” Greme began.
“Here, shut up, Greme!” interrupted Herbert. “Isn’t it time to sing
songs?”
He glanced anxiously at his cousin; but that enthusiastic young man was
gazing at Butler with a hypnotized stare, lost in an inward vision of
the youthful rebel painting in his stable-loft.
“It’s time to drop shop,” responded Cornpepper, sharply. “I’ve been
trying to get the talk off art for the last half-hour. I want to discuss
whiskey, woman, and song. What’s the difference who wins the Gold Medal,
or even the Prix de Rome? That’s the last one ever hears of them.”
“Oh no,” said Rapper; “all the professors at the Beaux-Arts took the
Prix de Rome.”
“Did the men with guts?” inquired Cornpepper, scathingly, as he glared
through his monocle at his contradictor. “Did the biggest of all, Puvis
de Chavannes? Now, you fellows define style, but it never occurs to you
that it is simply the perfect handling of your medium, whatever it be.
What makes the decorations of Puvis de Chavannes so great? Merely that
the gray, cool color scheme just suits the stone of the Pantheon. The
decorations of Laurens would be finer as easel pictures. They make the
building look smaller. Those of Chavannes ennoble it, give the sense of
space and atmosphere. The medium forced to yield its best--that is
style. There is one glory of silver-point and another of chalk or
pencil. Fritz’s pictures are damn bad because they are in the wrong
medium. To preserve a chronicle of the time is the function of black and
white. Only by--”
“I really must go,” said Jimmy, starting up again. “As a black-and-white
man I preserve a chronicle of the time, and it tells me it’s a
quarter-past ten, and I have got to meet my wife at the Monico at ten.”
“Oh, rot! There’s lots of time.” And a dozen hands pushed Jimmy into his
seat, and Carrie brought him more whiskey.
“I never could see how you square that with your principles,
Cornpepper,” argued Gurney, the gyrator, with a thoughtful wrinkle of
his elderly face. “Every painter’s got to do his own time. Posterity
won’t want Erle-Smith’s Greek gods with ginger-bread flesh, and sickly
sea-nymphs with wooden limbs. A cod’s head, well painted, is better than
a Madonna.” Erle-Smith had been his last idolized Master before he came
to worship at the shrine of Cornpepper.
“But there’s imagination in Erle-Smith,” Matt protested, deferentially.
Gurney snorted out quintessence of contempt in an indecorous
monosyllable. “‘Bus-drivers and ballet-girls--that’s the modern artist’s
duty to posterity. And his duty to his contemporaries is to find the
poetry and beauty around ’em and teach ’em to see it. That’s why your
‘Chimney on Fire in Fitzroy Street’ is the picture of the year.”
“Oh yes!” Matt burst forth, in the idiom of Granger’s, “it’s jolly
stunning!”
Cornpepper made a _moue_ of disgust. “Are we never going to get away
from shop?” he asked, desperately. “What has my chimney to do with the
chronicles of the time? You chaps have always misunderstood me. You all
go by what O’Brien writes of me in the _Saturday Spectator_. I do wish
he wouldn’t interpret me. I wish he’d leave me alone. It’s bad enough to
have the papers writing about one’s sayings and doings, it’s bad enough
to be afraid of your own friends when, like Levison and Wilfred Smith,
they happen to be journalists; but to be interpreted in leading articles
by O’Brien is the crowning blow. What right has he to meddle with art?
Why the hell doesn’t he stick to his last? If I painted that chimney--”
“Instead of sweeping it,” murmured Jimmy. “Do let me go and meet my
wife.”
“--it was because I saw an opportunity for style, and for giving an epic
sense of London,” little Cornpepper went on, fixing Jimmy with his
basilisk glare. “I don’t care a twopenny damn about posterity or my
contemporaries. I paint as I do everything else--to please myself.”
“We know you don’t please anybody else,” retorted Jimmy. “I _must_ be
off.”
“Well, black and white is going to be the art of the future, anyhow,”
said Butler. “Art is dead in England. Nobody disputes that.”
“Of course not,” said Cornpepper. “Painting’s a lost art. Not one of us
can touch the old men--Watts, Millais, Whistler. No; we none of us can
paint.”
“But English art’ll revive through black and white,” Butler maintained.
“It’s the art of the people. I wish I had discovered that in the days
when I refused to do it.”
“Black and white is not the art of the future, but the future of Art,”
said Herbert. “Nothing else pays.”
“It’s surer than anything else,” admitted Gurney. “And a paper gives you
a far wider appeal than a gallery. It’s the only way of elevating the
people.” His eye lit up. He was meditating a new departure.
Matt pricked up his ears; Herbert had not yet repaid him the twenty-five
pounds, borrowed for a day or two, and in any case he felt he must soon
be earning money. In the stagnation of the picture market, of which he
heard on every side, and on which the talk fell now, it was at once
comforting and distressing to hear of another source of income. Black
and white had scarcely entered into his thoughts before; he looked upon
it as a degraded commercial form of art--a thing manufactured for the
moment in obedience to editorial instructions. Perhaps if times had
changed, if editors allowed the artist to express himself through their
pages, one might think of it; otherwise it was too horrible. Art to
order! The spirit whose essence was freedom chained to a cash-box! It
were as well--and honester--to be a cobbler like William Gregson. He
shuddered violently, remembering his sufferings as a portrait-painter in
Nova Scotia, and very resolved to starve sooner than repeat those
degrading efforts to please customers.
“I don’t talk about it,” said Cornpepper, after ten minutes of general
tragic anecdotage, from which he gathered there was quite a rush into
black and white--a subject concerning which both the journalists seemed
fully posted. “I just go on working; I don’t care whether I sell or not.
The dealers I hate and despise; they have no measure of Art but what
it’ll fetch. I will have nothing to do with them. The world will come to
me sooner or later. You never hear _me_ grumbling about the market.”
“The more I hear of the troubles of you chaps,” said Rapper, “the more
surprised I am that I, with nothing like your talents, should be the one
to get the commissions, as if I had any need of the shiners. I’m going
to Birmingham again next week to do a municipal duffer in his robes.
Even when I studied art in Brussels--”
“The real reason we’re coming to black and white,” broke in the
spectacled Scotchman, “is that we’re all born color-blind. The dulness
of our surroundings, the long centuries of homes without decorations,
with unbeautiful furniture and crockery, have told, and now--”
There was a roar of laughter. “Stow that, Mack!” cried Rapper.
“You can’t keep Mack off shop,” cried Cornpepper. “I’m sick of this talk
about principles. Art, life, nature, realism, the decorative! The
decorative indeed! For what is Art? It isn’t studio-pictures, it’s--”
“It’s half-past ten,” groaned Jimmy, trying to shake off the detaining
hands of his friends. “Where’s Sandstone? Why hasn’t he turned up? He
goes my way.”
“I don’t know,” said Cornpepper. “He’s been quarrelling with the man who
published his lithographs. What a quarrelsome beggar he is! I believe
he’s quarrelled with Clinch now. By-the-way, where _is_ Clinch? He said
he was coming.”
Everybody supposed simultaneously that Clinch was drunk, and their
light-hearted acceptance of the idea jarred upon Matt, who again became
conscious of a curious aloofness from the company, from which he seemed
as cut off on the moral side as from the despised bourgeoisie on the
artistic side. What a strange isolation! The thought made him feel
lonely, and then--by reaction--strong.
Even Rocks laughed. “I prefer Philip drunk to Philip sober,” he said.
“It’s the only time he uses drawing-room English.”
“How can I sup with my wife at the Monico?” persisted Jimmy,
plaintively. “The beastly place closes at eleven on Sundays.”
“Oh, the English Sunday!” said Herbert. “How can you have art and the
English Sunday together? You talk of the art of the people, Curtis. The
real national art of England is oratorio, and Elijah may not appear on
the stage except in evening dress.”
“Don’t talk to me of the middle classes,” groaned Cornpepper. “They will
never be saved till Boccaccio is read aloud in every parlor on Sunday
afternoons.”
“Don’t be an ass, Teddy,” said Butler. “You’ll be moral some day.”
“I can get my stockings darned without marrying,” retorted Cornpepper,
with an irritating laugh, and Butler reddened angrily. He had married a
slipshod, artistic creature who neglected his shirt-buttons, and the
thrust rankled.
“_My_ wife’s waiting at the Monico,” complained Jimmy, in a droll
sing-song.
“Oh, bother! Carrie’s just making the coffee,” replied the host.
“I won’t have coffee,” said Jimmy; “I never mix drinks.”
The coffee came round, and with it sandwiches, and broke up the talk
into duets and trios. Cornpepper planned a house-boat party for the
summer to pick up nautical models and paint the river. Matt’s envious
consciousness that he was too poor and too obscure to share in these
delightful artistic experiences gave him a new and more disagreeable
sense of aloofness. Then the proceedings became musical and remained so
till the next morning, their refusal to depart before the advent of
which the guests melodiously declared.
As the party was breaking up, Cornpepper cried: “Oh, I was nearly
forgetting.”
“What?” said Jimmy. “To offer a prayer?”
“No, to take up a collection,” retorted Cornpepper, his eye-glass
gleaming with joy of the _mot_. “Lily’s broken her leg.”
“_Our_ Lily?” asked Greme. “But she doesn’t sit now--she’s on the
stage.”
“I know; she’s dislocated her ankle, and can’t dance.”
“She never could dance,” observed Herbert. “How ever did she get an
engagement?”
“Browney put her into his types of English beauty,” replied Cornpepper.
“But she’s a good girl all the same, and she hasn’t got any money. I’ll
lead off with five bob.”
In a few minutes two guineas were collected, Matt giving half a crown,
which he could ill spare. As the men left, Cornpepper stood at the door
exchanging a confidential word with each. “By Jove, you didn’t say a
word during the whole discussion, Mossop,” he said, as he shook hands
with a brown-bearded, middle-aged Scotchman, whose cranium bulged
curiously at the side.
Mossop took his pipe out of his mouth and looked meditatively at the
stem. “If art could be talked, it wouldn’t want to be painted,” he said,
gravely. “Good-night.”
“Good-night, old chap. Ah, good-night, Wilfred!” said Cornpepper to the
journalist. “Understand, this evening is private. I don’t object to your
quoting what I or anybody else said--my opinions are common
property--but, damn it, if you mention who were here in any of your
papers you’ll never cross my door-step again. You don’t mind my
frankness? Good-night, old man.”
“Good-night, Cornpepper,” said Herbert. “I’ll let the governor know
about those things of yours,” he added, in a low tone.
“That’s a good fellow. He won’t regret taking me up. Mind you mention
I’m not unreasonable--I’m open to an offer. I’m awfully glad to have
made your acquaintance. Good-night, old chap. Ah, good-night, Levison!”
he said, shaking hands with the other journalist. “Now, please do
understand that what passes at my gatherings is strictly confidential.
If you can earn half a dollar by mentioning who were here--Rocks is
rather a lion just now--I’m not the man to stand in your light. But I
won’t have what one says in private reported, and that’s straight.
Good-night, old fellow.”
Two o’clock boomed from a neighboring steeple. “Good-night, Teddy,” said
Jimmy, the last man to go. He added, lugubriously: “I’ve _still_ got to
meet my wife.” Then, as he caught sight of himself in the hall-rack
mirror, the gleam in his eye grew droller. “I’m going home in my own hat
and coat,” he grumbled. “I’m sober.”
It was delicious to breathe the balmy night air after the smoky,
alcoholic atmosphere of the studio. Rocks walked a little way with
Herbert and Matt under the silent stars before they came upon a hansom.
“Are you also an artist?” he asked Matt.
“I hope to be,” said Matt, gravely, “but it’s awfully confusing to know
what’s right. They all talk so cleverly, and they all seem to be right.”
He was still worried about formulæ, not having discovered that there are
only men.
Rocks emitted a short laugh. “Don’t you bother your head with theories,
my boy,” he said, laying his hand kindly on Matt’s shoulder. “You just
paint. Every man does what he can, and runs down what he can’t. After
all, Art is very old; there are no great sensational reforms left, like
West’s discarding the toga for the clothes of the period. The _plein
air_ school is this century’s contribution; after that there can only be
permutations and combinations of the old. What is new in the Azure Art
Gallery is not good, and what is good is not new.”
“_C’est fini!_” said Herbert. “That’s what people always say till genius
comes along. My belief is, going by literature and music, that painting
hasn’t said its last word.”
“It may come back to its first,” admitted Rocks, laughing. “Things go in
cycles. At present the last word of Art is azure.”
“But there _are_ azure shadows?” said Matt.
“Yes; sunshine on a yellow sand gives a suspicion of blue and violet
where the yellow light is cut off. But you exaggerate it and call that a
revolution.”
“Yes, but this intensified violet, made on your canvas out of light
pigments, does produce the illusion of sunlight,” argued Matt. “And, to
my mind, it doesn’t falsify nature or values one bit, because in bright
sunlight the eye really sees the dazzle, not the values.”
“Perhaps you young men see the new ultra-shades at the end of the
spectrum,” said Rocks, a little annoyed to find Matt restive under his
patronizing geniality. “Apelles had only four colors, but his reputation
has survived. It is the craze for novelty that makes these fads catch
on.”
“On the contrary,” retorted Matt, hotly, “people are so accustomed to
the false they have no eyes for the true. It’s the old fable of the man
with the pig under his cloak. I read somewhere that in Sir Joshua’s day
it was the convention to paint portraits with hats under their arm, and
that Sir Joshua, having to paint a man with his hat on, automatically
put a second hat under his arm. If he hadn’t found it out, I don’t
believe the public would have. And weren’t the 1830 men laughed at in
France, though now they’re thrown in the teeth of the Impressionists?
It’s always the same tale--the revolutionary is always wrong till he’s
right. Treason never prospers. What’s the reason? When ’tis successful,
’tis no longer treason.’ Truth and light--that’s the right formula of
landscape-painting.”
Herbert laughed. “My stars, Matt!” he cried, gayly, “that’s the longest
speech I’ve ever heard you make! Is Cornpepper’s whiskey so much better
than mine?”
It was, perhaps, not so much the whiskey as the reaction after the long,
respectful self-repression of the evening. But Rocks caught fire in his
turn.
“Revolution!” he cried, scornfully. “Doing things literally by
halves--_there’s_ a revolution, _there’s_ a revelation for you. The new
art! If the modern young man can’t draw, color’s the thing; and if he’s
got no sense of color, color is vulgar. And even if he doesn’t offend my
sense of line by figures that couldn’t stand and limbs that don’t fit on
he won’t finish his work. He leaves it half-cooked to show his _chic_;
to take it further would be Academic. It’s mere notes for pictures, not
pictures. And even at that half the ideas come from Paris, like our
ladies’ gowns; if you ran over there as often as I do you could put your
finger on most of these azure fellows’ inspirations. If they would only
search like the French! If they would only really imitate their Monet!
That’s a real worker for you--how he slaves at his hay-stacks! More
science than art to my thinking; but how he searches! These chaps are
such dwarfs. Think of Leonardo, think of Raphael, think of Millet--real
men, with big brains and big souls. No; this Azure Art Club’s a set of
bounders and bad draughtsmen. There’s too much mutual admiration; it
prevents men getting on; they’ll find themselves stranded with a
half-talent.”
“And hasn’t Butler got a big soul?” cried Matt, boiling over. “And
hasn’t Cornpepper got a big brain?”
“Cornpepper?--oh, but this is shop again. He’s a good little chap at
bottom, but he’s succeeding too young.” And in Rocks’s hearty guffaw the
storm-clouds rolled away.
“You mustn’t fancy I agree with him altogether, Mr. Rocks,” said Matt,
simmering down in his turn. “About the morality of Art, now, isn’t
there--”
“Ah, there’s the Methodist parson again,” interrupted Herbert, laughing.
“Hang it all, man, you’re not a virgin, are you?”
“No, of course not,” faltered Matt, mendaciously. He went on in haste:
“_There’s_ a cab!”
“No, I hate four-wheelers!” said Herbert. “Then why the devil do you
always talk such rot? Hansom!”
“They don’t seem as united as the papers make out, anyway,” said Matt,
in shame-faced evasion. He was ashamed of the lie, and ashamed of its
not being true.
“No, there’s no _esprit de corps_ among artists,” returned Rocks.
“People always imagine there are schools. But in London there’s only the
camaraderie of success and the camaraderie of unsuccess. Good-night.”
“Can’t we give you a lift?” said Herbert.
“No, thanks; I’m successful,” rejoined Rocks, and went off chuckling.
“I wish _I_ was,” Herbert grumbled to Matt. “Fancy not being able to
join that house-boat party, but to be stuck down in town by the Old
Gentleman to paint Nebuchadnezzar. I wish I was you, Matt.”
Matt was on the point of consoling him by confessing he was on the brink
of ruin, but that would have seemed like dunning a friend, to whom he
owed so much, for the twenty-five pounds, so he postponed the inevitable
explanation.