TOWARDS THE DEEPS
The summer rolled heavily along, bringing strange new experiences to
Matt Strang, and strange glimpses of other art-worlds than Herbert’s.
For he did not starve, though Herbert had gone quite out of his life,
and he had none with whom to exchange the thoughts of youth.
Two pounds ten shillings lent on his dress-suit staved off hunger and
his tailor (who got the pounds), till, by the aid of the landlady’s
son’s book, he found out how to tint photographs, and earned sixpences
and shillings by coloring cartes-de-visite and cabinets for cheap
touting photographers, censoriously critical and given to refusing the
work of hours. By-and-by the _Christian Home_ took him to its hearth,
situate at the summit of a cobwebbed ramshackle staircase in Bolt Court,
and paid him seven and sixpence for a half-page illustration of an
unworldly serial. “Pay-day” was a delightful weekly emotion, the staff
adjourning to a public-house in Fleet Street to drink one another’s
health and their own damnation. Matt was forced to join them because
Dick Gattel, the puffy-faced author of the spiritual romance he was
illustrating (“A Godly Atonement”), insisted on standing treat,
declaring with odd oaths that he’d never been so well interpreted before
by any blooming paper-smudger. He also initiated Matt into the secrets
of his craft, summing up in a formula the experience of a quarter of a
century of story-writing. “Emotion for the penny papers, excitement for
the halfpenny, self-sacrifice for the religious.” Strange impecunious
beings gathered in this public-house or outside it, uncouth, unclean,
unshaven; many had drifted down from society, from the universities,
from the army, from the navy, with reserve forces from India and
America, the flotsam of life’s wreckage, and they consoled themselves by
babbling of the seamy side of the successful, rolling under their
tongues the money these others were making, and parading a confident
familiarity with their doings and their pass-books. Matt shuddered at
the thought that he might one day become even as these--the
damned-before-death. There was another artist on the staff--a thick-set
German, whose wife was wont to waylay him on “pay-day,” and who always
wrote on professional paper girdled with his own designs in proof of his
prowess, and expressive of his willingness to undertake wash-drawings,
line-drawings, color-work, or lithography, at reasonable rates and with
prompt deliveries.
Through this German, who was good-natured after his second glass, Matt
procured extra employment in a comic-picture factory managed by a
solemn, snuffy Scotchman, who selected from old comic papers the jokes
that were to be illustrated by his “hands,” and, signing the sketches
with his own name, peddled them in the offices of new comic papers. Matt
was paid half a crown per sketch, and his employer from four to five
shillings; but when the young man tried to send original jokes and
sketches direct to these papers, he got only the same two and sixpence
for the few things they accepted. One editor, whose pages bristled with
ballet-girls, took the trouble to explain to him that the presence of a
clergyman in a sketch was a disqualification, as any attack on the
Church would be distasteful to his public. From another, the _Merry
Miracle_, whose proprietor was a philanthropist, a member of the school
board, and a candidate for Parliament, he received a prospectus
instructing him to eschew cross-hatching, solid black, line-work, and
society figures, in favor of rough-and-tumble farce in bold outline. The
more sober of the comic papers had settled staffs and settled jokes, and
new-comers were not welcomed. Not that Matt’s jokes were very good:
labored verbal oddities for the most part, intellectual quips and cranks
which, he was quite aware, lacked the true humorous insight of Jimmy
Raven, upon whom he modelled himself, feeling no first-hand impulse.
Humor, indeed, was not his vocation; when he saw the world through
Jimmy’s eyes he was tickled yet fortified, as one set face to face with
the prose of the real, and finding it genial; but he could not see it
like this himself. His was a world of beauty set over a strange,
disquieting substratum of ugliness, from which it were best to avert
one’s eyes, and which, perhaps, existed only as something to aspire away
from.
Jimmy Raven had published _A Sketch-Book of Beggars_ which Matt Strang
had found vastly entertaining; and yet Matt Strang saw rather the
tragedy of beggars than their humor, and this tragedy seemed to him
outside the realm of Art. It was only their occasional picturesqueness
that attracted his artistic interest at this period of his development,
and all the figures of his so-called comic sketches were either pretty
or picturesque. He studied extensively in the streets, note-book in
hand, fearful of losing the subtleties of nature through his inability
to afford even the cheap, casual models of his first days in London, and
training himself to catch the salient points of character or movement at
first glance. Probably no artist ever made comic pictures so seriously
as Matt Strang, with such scrupulous backgrounds, in the which, when
they were done in wash, he strove with entirely unappreciated
thoroughness, by careful adjustment of values, to make his black and
white yield veracious color-effects. When the drawings were accepted,
they came out so reduced and so badly reproduced that the subtleties
were blurred away, and the values quite transmuted. Wood-engraving
falsified the lines or photography the color, and thus their appearance
in print was as much a pain as a pleasure.
Matt’s redemption from comic journalism was partly due to the prosperity
of the proprietor of the comic-picture factory, who started a
serious-art department, where Matt found less uncongenial work in
painting figures into the landscapes of his less competent
fellow-workmen. This gradually opened up to his astonished eyes a new
section of the trade. He saw one of these landscapes near King’s Cross,
resplendent in a gorgeous gold frame, and marked “Original
oil-painting--two guineas only,” and another, in a poor neighborhood
marked “Water-color, hand-painted--a bargain!” and he perceived that he
had been flying too high in his early attempts to approach dealers of
the type of Drücker. Henceforward he haunted furniture dealers,
picture-frame makers, and artists’ colormen, and thus he occasionally
obtained half a sovereign to despatch to his tailor. His drawings in the
_Christian Home_ attracted the attention of the editor of the _Working
Man_, and Matt was commissioned to accompany a journalist through the
East End to expose the evils of sweating. The _Working Man_ was owned by
a syndicate, and Matt had to settle terms with the manager, a truculent
gentleman with a double chin and a double watch-chain, who agreed to
give him five shillings a sketch. Matt did several sketches for each
article, and the pathetic series caused a great stir and much
correspondence; but at the end of the month--when poor Matt, who had
already nearly starved himself for his tailor’s sake, was expecting a
goodly check to send to Abner Preep--he received only a quarter of what
he had bargained for. He went to the editor, who referred him to the
manager, who insisted the terms were five shillings for the illustration
of a single article. “You must remember, too, what a lift we are giving
you, with our big circulation,” concluded the manager, his double
watch-chain heaving pompously on his abdomen. “It is not every young man
who gets such a chance of showing what he can do.”
“You’re a set of damned scoundrels!” cried Matt, with an access of
ancient rage, and had wellnigh torn up the check and thrown it in the
manager’s face, when his later chastened self plucked at his coat-tails
and bade him begone with it. Who so helpless as the black-and-white
artist, his work poorly paid, and reproduced again and again without his
control; his very originals taken from him and sometimes sold at a
profit?
It was not a happy time for Matt, this period of spiritless work by day
and spiritless study by night, his soul chafing alike against the
degradations of life and the routine of school. For what an actuality
had he exchanged his dreams! Yet he had no option; the tailor must be
paid, his family must be helped, and to these two ends, moreover, he
himself must exist. But the friction of ideals and realities left him
irritable and high-strung; and even when, towards the autumn, he won his
way into the _Ladies’ Weekly_, at a guinea an illustration, he lost his
work by not concealing his contempt for the art editor, a pragmatic
person, absolutely dead to art, but excessively fastidious about the
drawings, which he refused whenever there was time for alterations.
“This is feeble, but we’re pressed for time,” was his encouraging
apology to the artist for accepting his work, “and I’ll put it into the
hands of a competent engraver.” His first self-revelation to Matt was
his complaint about some rough shadows on the borders of a sketch: “I
wish you would bear in mind, Mr. Strang, that we have to pay as much per
inch for the reproduction of those blotches as for the most finished
work.” But it was not till the “old lady” (as the other artists called
the art editor of the _Ladies’ Weekly_ behind his back) had insisted on
his dressing his figures better that Matt lost control of his tongue and
retorted, “I draw pictures, not fashion-plates.” In after-remorse, he
would have been glad to get fashion-plates to do. He replaced the lost
work by returning to photo-tinting, though he now obtained more
important work on enlarged photographs, which he colored in oil at
three and six apiece, managing to do two or three a day while the light
held, without interfering with his black and white, which could be done
at night; by which means he scraped together enough to pay off the
tailor in full, and to send his promised contribution home, together
with seven fourpenny halfpenny “Notable Novels” to reconcile Billy to
his narrow existence. And then, with these burdens thrown off, his
idealism resurged again, for beneath the placid everyday exterior of
this homely young man, who trudged up foul staircases, portfolio under
arm, or danced attendance on smug h-less photographers smoking twopenny
cigars, a volcanic fire burned, and the thought of his precious youth
wasted and abraded in this inartistic art-drudgery, under the yoke of
vulgar souls, was a dull haunting torment. His qualms of self-distrust
vanished under the pressure of obstacles, and the measure of his
aversion from joyless commercial art became to him the measure of his
genius. One gray windy forenoon of late autumn he had stopped to take a
mental sketch of a strangely attired woman, who was listening to a
Salvation Army exhortation, a woman who was a dab of color upon the
dreary day. Below an enormous white hat with a recumbent ostrich feather
and a broad brim with an upward slant, tied under the chin with black
bands, shone through a black veil a glorious oval-shaped dark face with
flashing eyes, full red lips, large shapely ears, and raven hair curling
low over the forehead. She wore a black, half-masculine jacket, with big
mother-of-pearl buttons and a yellow bow that was awry, and by a shapely
hand cased in a white glove with three black stripes she held the skirts
of a slaty gown clear of the mud.
While Matt was whimsically wondering what the editor of the _Christian
Home_ would say to a sketch of her in his staid organ, he instinctively
noted the other romantic touches about the scene, ineffably grimy though
the roadway was to the inartistic eye, flanked on one side by a coal
office, with a blear-eyed old man at the window, and on the other by a
canal running lengthwise. There were fresh country faces among the
girl-soldiers, and among the men was an ex-heathen in a turban, a
flaring Paisley shawl, flowing robes, and sandals, bearing aloft a red
flag with a blue border and a central yellow star, around which ran the
words “Blood and Fire.” And while his eye selected the picturesque
points, the whole scene passed half insensibly into his
sub-consciousness as into a camera, to be developed in after-years--the
grotesque snag-toothed hags in the crowd, the collarless men with the
air of being connected with the canal, one of them with a
Mephistophelian red tuft on his chin; the ice-cream stall at the corner,
where a postman, a baby of three, and an urchin with his collar
paradoxically up against the cold were licking green glasses. And then a
buxom work-girl with a tambourine began to hold forth, pouring out
breathless sentences all running into one another, clutching her
inspiration tight lest it should escape her, and repeating herself
endlessly rather than pause for a moment.
“Only the blood of Christ can save only the blood of Christ has saved
only the blood of Christ will save.”
And her fellow-soldiers, quivering with unction, punctuated her
shapeless periods with soul-wrung ejaculations.
“Ah, yes.”
“Bless her.”
“Glory to God.”
“You may try earthly pleasures you may go to the theaytre,” she gasped,
“but it brings no peace nothing brings peace but the Rock but the
Lamb--”
“Hallelujah!”
“But the oldest of all religions proved over and over again Christianity
tried in the furnace any day you may die no one knows the end now’s the
time don’t put it off come are you prepared once I had bad companions--”
“A--a--ah!” groaned a melodramatic brother, with folded arms.
“But I gave them up--”
“Glory!” in a great sob of relief from all the palpitating figures.
Matt began to forget the visual aspects of the scene; the infectious
emotion of the girl and her comrades gained upon him. What she was
saying left no dint on his mind--to her dogmas he was become
indifferent. But her earnestness thrilled him, her impassioned
ignorance flashed upon him a clearer sense of baseness, hollowness,
insincere falling away from the ideals that had sailed with him to
England, glorifying the noisome steerage. Turning his head, he saw tears
rolling down the dark passionate face of his dashing neighbor, and he
hurried away, shaken and troubled, pursued by the cacophonous melody
into which the street congregation had broken.
What was the point of his life? What had he become?
At Grainger’s there were fellows who looked to Art as an escape from
some worse-paid calling. That was not, had never been, his idea. To him
Art was an end in itself; he was of those who live to paint, not paint
to live. Even in his boyish days, when the vendibility of pictures first
came within his ken, the money had always seemed to him a pleasant
by-product, not a motive. And now, instead of pouring out on canvas all
that effervescence of youthful poetry that flooded his soul, he was
coloring photographs and illustrating foolish stories for foolish
editors in contravention of all his own ideas of what illustrations
should be. Why, even in Nova Scotia he had painted from the life; in his
lowest days he had decorated furniture at his own pleasure. Oh, it was
sordid, unworthy, humiliating! He would give it all up: if he could not
pursue Art, at least he would not degrade it. Thanks to his Nova-Scotian
training, his good right hand could do more than wield the brush. Better
to earn bread and water for himself and his family by some honest craft,
till such time as honest Art came within his means. Rather an honest
artisan than a dishonest artist. And while he was still hot with the
impulse he looked through the advertisement columns of the _Clerkenwell
Chronicle_, and answered three demands, one for a “joiner,” another for
a “sugar-boiler,” and the third for a “harness-cleaner.”
The sugar-boiling firm alone answered, and he was asked to call. He
stated that he had had considerable experience of the manufacture in
Nova Scotia, but a brief conversation convinced the manager that the
applicant knew nothing of scientific sugar-boiling, with its elaborate
engines and differentiation of labor; but Matt’s sober, respectable
appearance and his conviction of his capacity stood him in good stead,
and he was given a fortnight’s trial at eighteen shillings a week, with
a prospect of rising to forty. In his confidence of mastering the easy
detail, and to clinch his resolution, he wrote to his art patrons
throwing up his position in each establishment with due form and
superfluous sarcasm, and one happy morning, soon after sunrise, repaired
to the factory with a more buoyant tread than had been his since the
memorable day when he crossed the great bridge which led to the heart of
all the splendors.
The fortnight’s end found him spiritually seared and physically scalded.
The depressing society of the British working-man, the ever-present
contrast of the blank building with the free forest in which he had made
sugar in his boyhood (how happy his boyhood seemed now!), and the
overflowing contents of the seething boilers, demonstrated to him daily
that he had made a mistake. He might have stayed on nevertheless, but
the dread that an accidental scald on the hand might permanently injure
his power with the brush made the trial fortnight his last. He scanned
the advertisement columns again, with no suspicion of what now awaited
him.
He had been misled by the comparative facility with which he had found
work hitherto; he was now destined to re-experience--far more poignantly
than in New Brunswick--the long-drawn agony of unemployment, the
sickness of hope deferred; to bruise himself against the ruthless
indifference of an overstaffed nation; to see and hear the blind, deaf
forces of the social machine grind out happiness for all but him. At
first he did not mind getting no replies, except for the waste of
stamps, for he took feverish advantage of the hours of daylight thus
left free for Art. But as day followed day, and week followed week, the
perturbation of his soul and the weakness of his body, enfeebled by
hunger and cold, made painting difficult; and he had not even the
capital to expend on canvas. Broken in health and pride, he applied
again for his old work, prepared even to tint cartes-de-visite. But his
place had been filled up. The stream of human life had flowed on as if
he had never been. The work he had got was the only work in London open
to a man in his position, and this work he had thrown away. One of the
papers he had so imprudently quarrelled with was willing to take him on
again, but at half the price. Subdued as he was, a pride he afterwards
felt to have been insane spurred him to refuse. He fancied he could get
such terms from a score of other papers, but he was mistaken. In truth,
black and white was no more his _métier_ than humor. The rush into black
and white, of which he had first heard at Cornpepper’s, had filled the
ranks with abler men or of older standing, with a better appreciation of
the market, and of how to draw for reproduction by the new processes
just coming up. And he had yet to learn, also, that the world went very
well without him; that it had no need for him either as artist or
artisan, craftsman or clerk; that every hole had its peg, round or
square; and that he was of no more account in the surging life of London
than the fallen leaves blown about the bleak squares.
He earned a few odd shillings now and then for his old pictures by
persuading some small skinflint dealer to cheat him; and that was all.
Once he was cruelly tantalized--a five-pound commission to copy a
National Gallery picture being dangled before him, only to be withdrawn.
He parted with all but the barest necessities--with the fashionable
morning suit, with his pistol, with the Gregson boots; his only luxury
was the engraving of the “Angelus,” which he had retained because nobody
offered more than eighteenpence for it. The bulk of the money thus
raised was remitted to Abner Preep, as promised; the rest went to pay
Mrs. Lipchild. Himself he so stinted that often when he went to
Grainger’s (which he had fortunately prepaid) he took care to arrive
first, not only because of the warmth, but because the girl students,
whose class preceded his, left stale crusts lying about, whose crumb had
been used up on their charcoal drawings. To such straits may a man sink
in a few weeks, though he sinks slowly, for each week is a year to him.
But outwardly he preserved dignity, brushing his one suit scrupulously,
and glad that, owing to his interlude of fashionable tailoring, it was
still in good condition; for the vision of the lost mortals was ever
before his eyes, and he foresaw that without a decent appearance he
would not be able to grasp an opportunity even when it came, but would
be driven down to the deeps to join the damned souls outside that Fleet
Street public-house, within which the happier staff of the _Christian
Home_ ushered in the Sabbath with beer.
And the more London refused him the more his consciousness of power
grew. As he tramped the teeming streets in quest of a job or a customer,
a thousand ideas for great pictures jostled in his sick brain, a
thousand fine imaginings took form and shape in beautiful
color-harmonies and majestic groupings. In the ecstatic frenzy of
moments of hysterical revolt against the blind forces closing in upon
him like a tomb to shut him out forever from the sunlight, he grew
Titanic to his own thought, capable of masterpieces in any and every
kind of art--great heroic frescos like Michael Angelo’s, great homely
pictures like those of the Dutch, great classic canvases like Raphael’s,
great portraits like Rembrandt’s, great landscapes like Turner’s, great
modern street-pieces like Cornpepper’s, great mediæval romances like
Erle-Smith’s, not to say great new pictures that should found the school
of Strang, combining all the best points of all the schools, the ancient
poetry with the modern realism. Nay, even literary impulses mingled with
artistic in these spasms of nebulous emotion, his immature genius not
having yet grasped the limitations of the paintable. Good God! what did
he ask? Not the voluptuous round of the young men whose elegant
silhouettes standing out against the black, silent night from the warm
lighted windows of great houses athrob with joyous music filled him with
a mad bitterness; not the soft rose-leaf languors of the beautiful white
women who passed in shimmering silks and laces from gleaming
spick-and-span carriages under canvas awnings over purple carpets amid
spruce, obsequious footmen; not the selfish joys of these radiant
shadows dancing their way to dusty oblivion, to be trodden under foot by
the generations over which he would shine as a star, serene, immortal;
but bread and water and a little money for models and properties, and a
top-light straight in touch with heaven, and a few pounds to send home
to his kith and kin; but to paint, to paint, to joy in conception and to
glory in difficult execution, to express the poetry of the ideal through
real flesh and real shadows and real foliage, and find a rapturous agony
in the search for perfection; to paint, to paint, to exult fiercely in
the passing of faces, with their pathos and their tragedy, to catch a
smile on a child’s face and the grace of a girl’s movement and the
passion in the eyes of a woman; to watch the sunrise consecrating tiles
and chimneys, or the river, mirroring a thousand night-lights, glide on,
glorifying its own uncleanness; to express the intense stimulus of the
wonderful city, resonant with the tireless tread of millions of feet,
vibrant with the swirl of perpetual currents of traffic, pulsating with
the rough music of humanity-roaring markets, shrilling trains, panting
steamships; to record in pigment not only the romance of his dreams or
the glamour of the dead past, but the poetry of the quick--the rich,
full life of the town, the restless day and the feverish night, with its
mysterious perspectives of fitful gleams; to paint, to paint, anything,
everything, for the joy of eternalizing the transient beauty that lurked
everywhere--in the shimmer of a sunlit puddle, in the starry heaven, in
the motions of barefoot children dancing to a barrel-organ, in the
scarlet passing of soldiers, in the play of light on the fish in a
huckster’s barrow, in the shadowy aisles of city churches throbbing with
organ diapasons.
Oh, the joy of life! Oh, the joy of Art that expressed the joy of life!
Yes, but in the absence of a few bits of metal, neither joy nor Art nor
even life could be his. He must die, be swept off from among the surging
crowds of which he was an unnoticed unit, and no one would ever know
what mighty things he had dreamed and suffered in his little span of
years. Every supper eaten by radiant couples at richly lit restaurants
would have nourished him for weeks, nor did it diminish the bitter
socialistic sentiment this reflection caused him to remember that he
himself had fared as wantonly once and again. At least, he had earned
his money. What gave those young men with the vacant faces, those women
with the improbable complexions, the right to all the good things at the
table of life? Even Herbert was splashed by this wave of bitterness;
Herbert, the brilliant, with his battalion of boots. Ah! poor little
Billy was right. It was impossible to believe in anything--to see any
justice in life.
And was it worth while going on? The thought presented itself again and
again, especially in those November days when London was as dark as his
own soul; and it made him half sorry, half glad that a grim Providence
had sent his pistol to the pawnshop. He was walking to Grainger’s one
evening in such a double darkness of without and within, when the memory
came to him of a newspaper paragraph concerning people who had wandered
into the river, and, hypnotized by the idea, he bent his steps towards
the docks, with a vague intention of giving death a chance. What did it
matter what became of his brothers and sisters? It were better that they
died too. In any case he could not help them any more; he had just
scraped together the usual remittance, but he could not see where the
next was to come from. But his semi-somnambulistic motion did not bear
him towards the water-side; in the gray obscurity he erred endlessly in
strange ghostly squares, whose chill iron-railed enclosures loomed like
cemeteries through the sepulchral air.
London smelled like a boiled sponge; the raw air reeked with sulphurous
grime, as if the chimneys of hell had been swept. It was not an inviting
world to remain in. A gigantic brown head of a horse suddenly shot past
his. He jumped back, but a shadowy wheel caught him in the pit of the
stomach and hurled him across the road, where he fell on his back,
hearing inarticulate noises from the cabman, and just seeing the hansom
swallowed up again by the yellow sea. He got up, feeling dazed and
indignant, rather than hurt, and staggered along in purposeless pursuit
of the vanished cab. He found himself in a business street, where the
illumined shop-fronts thinned the fog. A familiar face, with a strange
green light upon it from a chemist’s window, burst upon him as
unexpectedly as the horse. It was Tarmigan’s. He studied it abstractedly
for a moment in its greenish pallor, with its deep furrows, seeming to
read clearly a weariness and heart-sickness akin to his own, and struck
for the first time by the shabbiness and flaccidity of the figure. Then
the face took a more joyous expression than he had ever seen in it, and
he heard Tarmigan saying:
“Hullo, Strang! Are you lost, too?”
“Yes, sir--at least, I don’t quite know, sir,” he replied, like one
awaking from a dream.
“You’re usually at Grainger’s at this hour. I’m on my way there. If you
are going to-night we had better keep together.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Matt.
He went into the chemist’s to inquire their whereabouts, and feeling a
little stiff, had the sudden idea of laying out his last coppers in
arnica; then he began to pilot his master with a sense of lofty
responsibility. But they walked in silence, mutually embarrassed.
Tarmigan coughed lengthily.
“Ought you to be out on a night like this, sir?” Matt ventured to say.
“Duty, my boy, duty,” rejoined Tarmigan, gruffly.
“But you are not bound to go, are you, sir?” Matt remonstrated,
remembering that Tarmigan’s services were a voluntary sacrifice at the
shrine of Art.
“I am not forced by an outsider, if that’s what you mean,” said
Tarmigan. “But that wouldn’t be duty, that would be necessity--at least,
in my definition.”
“Then duty is only what you feel you ought to do,” said Matt.
“Decidedly. Any man who knows what true Art is is bound to hand it down
to the next generation, especially in an age when there is so much false
doctrine in the air.”
“But can’t each generation find out its own Art?” Matt asked, timidly.
“Can each generation find out its own science?” Tarmigan retorted,
sharply. “In all things there is a great human tradition, and the torch
is handed down from generation to generation; otherwise we should be in
a nice fog,” he added, grimly, and coughed again. “And a nice fog the
young men are in who reject the light of the past, with their azure Art,
and their violet nonsense, and their slapdash sketchiness.”
“But they seem to be gaining the public ear,” Matt murmured, liking
neither to contradict his master nor to agree with him.
“The public ear!” Tarmigan laughed scornfully. “Yes, they gain that,
but not the public eye, thank God. That can still tell slipshod botchery
from honest, faithful work.”
“But Cornpepper is in the Academy this year,” Matt reminded him.
“Yes; the Academy lets itself be outbawled,” said Tarmigan, sharply. “I
wish I were a member!”
“I wish you were,” said Matt, fervently.
Tarmigan coughed.
“I didn’t mean what you mean,” he said, gruffly.
“Oh, but they ought to elect you, sir!” said Matt, rushing in on
delicate ground in his enthusiasm for the man’s character. “Everybody
says so.”
“Who’s everybody?” Tarmigan inquired, bitterly. “Society doesn’t say so,
for I don’t go to its drawing-rooms; the R.A.’s don’t say so, for I’m
unknown to their wives. But I am unjust. Let us drop the subject. After
all, a man’s work stands, even if he is passed over in his lifetime.”
Matt felt a sharp pang of sympathy for this strong, stern man sustained
by the false dream of immortality. He could not conceive that posterity
would care a rap for Tarmigan’s cold classic pictures. Indeed, now that
he had assimilated all that was good in Tarmigan’s teaching, he only
went to the studio for the sake of the model and the practice. Emotion
and embarrassment kept him silent.
“Do you live with your people?” Tarmigan asked, presently, in an
interested tone.
“No,” said Matt; “they are in America.”
“Oh, ah, yes; so you told me. You’re not married?”
“No.”
“Nor engaged, I hope?”
“No,” said Matt, wonderingly.
“That’s right. No artist should marry. His wife is sure to drag him down
to sacrifice his Art to her pleasures and wants. Fine feathers and fine
houses are ruining English Art. I warn you of this, because you have the
makings of an artist if you work hard.”
“You are very kind, sir,” said Matt, touched.
“Not at all. You have a fine natural talent, still undisciplined. So
long as you keep yourself free from matrimonial complications you may
hope to achieve something. A single man can live on bread and water. I
am heartily glad to hear you have nobody to keep but yourself.”
Matt smiled grimly under the imagined cover of the fog.
“Ah, I know what you’re smiling at,” said Tarmigan, more genially than
he had yet spoken. “You’re wondering whether the preacher is a bachelor.
Well, I am proud to say I’m still single, though I can’t boast of living
on bread and water. You see, it isn’t only the expense; marriage spoils
the silent incubation of ideas; the wife wants her husband, not his
Art.”
“But suppose an artist falls in love--isn’t it hard on him?” asked Matt.
“No man can serve two masters. Every artist has got to ask himself, Does
he want Happiness, or does he want Art? That choice will face _you_ one
day, Mr. Strang.”
“I hope not,” said Matt. “But I guess Art’s enough for me.” He spoke in
a tone of quiet conviction, and his bosom swelled. Happiness, forsooth!
How could there be Happiness apart from Art? Or how could Art be apart
from Happiness?
Their talk fell to a lower level. Matt casually expressed an ardent wish
to see sundry R.A.’s, especially the president. He had only come across
the second-rate painters or the young men. He felt vaguely that he was
at one with Butler and Greme and Herbert, and apparently Tarmigan also,
in despising them, though he had only seen one of their exhibitions;
they were in power and popular, and therefore time-serving mediocrities.
Yet beneath all this prejudice was a keen curiosity about them, and a
latent respect for these oldsters who had arrived. Tarmigan promised to
get him a ticket for the prize distribution of the Academy Schools next
month, when he would see most of them. The suggestion of suicide slunk
into the rear; the spectacle of the Academicians was something to live
for. Then the old man and the young relapsed into silent thoughts of
their art, projecting visions of ideal beauty on the background of
yellow, grimy vapor that shrouded the great dreary city.
But when Matt sat down to paint that night he found himself
incapacitated, a mass of aches and bruises. He went home to anoint
himself with his arnica; in the unconscious optimism of sickness the
suggestion of suicide had vanished altogether.