He had long known, of course, that to say the word “bourgeois” with
contempt was a little bit old-fashioned, and he did his utmost not
to; yet was there a still small voice within him that would whisper:
“Those people--I want to and I do treat them as my equals. I have
even gone so far of late years as to dress like them, to play their
games, to eat regularly, to drink little, to love decorously, with many
other bourgeois virtues, but in spite of all I remain where I was, an
inhabitant of another--” and, just as he thought the whispering voice
was going to die away, it would add hurriedly--“and a better world.”
It worried him; and he would diligently examine the premises of that
small secret conclusion, hoping to find a flaw in the justness of his
conviction that he was superior. But he never did; and for a long time
he could not discover why.
Often the conduct of the “bourgeois” would strike him as almost
superfluously good. They were brave, much braver than he was conscious
of being; clean-thinking, oh, far more clean-thinking than a man
like himself, necessarily given to visions of all kinds; they were
straightforward, almost ridiculously so, as it seemed to one who saw
the inside-out of everything almost before he saw the outside-out;
they were simple, as touchingly simple as those little children, to
whom Scriptures and post-impressionism had combined to award the crown
of wisdom; they were kind and self-denying in a way that often made
him feel quite desperately his own selfishness--and yet--they were
inferior. It was simply maddening that he could never rid himself of
that impression.
It was one November afternoon, while talking with another artist, that
the simple reason struck him with extraordinary force and clarity: _He
could make them, and they could not make him!_
It was clearly this which caused him to feel so much like God when
they were about. Glad enough, as any man might be, of that discovery,
it did not set his mind at rest. He felt that he ought rather to be
humbled than elated. And he went to work at once to be so, saying to
himself: “I am just, perhaps, a little nearer to the Creative Purpose
than the rest of the world--a mere accident, nothing to be proud of; I
can’t help it, nothing to make a fuss about, though people will!” For
it did seem to him sometimes that the whole world was in conspiracy
to make him feel superior--as if there were any need! He would have
felt much more comfortable if that world had despised him, as it used
to in the old days, for then the fire of his conviction could with
so much better grace have flared to heaven; there would have been
something fine about a superiority leading its own forlorn hope. But
this trailing behind the drums and trumpets of a press and public so
easily taken in he felt to be both flat and a little degrading. True,
he had his moments, as when his eyes would light on sentences like
this (penned generally by clergymen): “All this talk of art is idle;
what really matters is morals.” Then, indeed, his spirit would flame,
and after gazing at “is morals” with flashing eye and curling lip, and
wondering whether it ought to have been “are morals,” he would say to
whomsoever might happen to be there: “These bourgeois! What do they
know? What can they see?” and, without waiting for an answer, would
reply: “Nothing! Nothing! Less than nothing!” and mean it. It was
at moments such as these that he realised how he not only despised,
but almost hated, those dense and cocky Philistines who could not
see his obvious superiority. He felt that he did not lightly call
them by such names, because they really _were_ dense and cocky, and
no more able to see things from his point of view than they were to
jump over the moon. These fellows could see nothing except from their
own confounded view-point! They were so stodgy too; and he gravely
distrusted anything static. Flux, flux, and once more flux! He knew
by intuition that an artist alone had the capacity for concreting
the tides of life in forms that were not deleterious to anybody. For
rules and canons he recognised the necessity with his head (including
his tongue), but never with his heart; except, of course, the rules
and canons of art. He worshipped these; and when anybody like Tolstoi
came along and said, “Blow art!” or words to that effect, he hummed
like bees caught on a gust of wind. What did it matter whether you
had anything to express, so long as you expressed it? That only was
“pure æsthetics,” as he often said. To place before the public eye
something so exquisitely purged of thick and muddy actuality that it
might be as perfectly without direct appeal to-day as it would be two
thousand years hence--this was an ambition to which in truth he nearly
always attained; this only was great art. He would assert with his last
breath--which was rather short, for he suffered from indigestion--that
one must never concrete anything in terms of ordinary nature. No! one
must devise pictures of life that would be equally unfamiliar to men
in A.D. 2520 as they had been in A.D. 1920; and when an inconsiderate
person drew his attention to the fact that to the spectator in 2520
the most naturalistic pictures of the life of 1920 would seem quite
convincingly fantastic, so that there was no need for him to go out of
his way to devise fantasy--he would stare. For he was emphatically not
one of those who did not care a button what the form was so long as
the spirit of the artist shone clear and potent through the pictures
he drew. No, no; he either demanded the poetical, the thing that got
off the ground, with the wind in its hair (and he himself would make
the wind, rather perfumed); or--if not the poetical--something observed
with extreme fidelity and without the smallest touch of that true
danger to art, the temperamental point of view. “No!” he would say;
“it’s our business to put it down just as it is, to see it, not to feel
it. In feeling damnation lies.” And nothing gave him greater uneasiness
than to find the emotions of anger, scorn, love, reverence, or pity
surging within him as he worked, for he knew that they would, if he
did not at once master them, spoil a certain splendid vacuity that he
demanded of all art. In painting, Raphael, Tintoretto, and Holbein
pleased him greatly; in fiction, “Salammbô” was his model, for, as he
very justly said, you could supply to it what soul you liked--there
being no inconvenient soul already in possession.
As can be well imagined, his conviction of being, in a small way,
God, permeated an outlook that was passionless, and impartial to a
degree--except perhaps toward the bourgeoisie, with their tiring morals
and peculiar habits. If he had a weakness, it was his paramount desire
to suppress in himself any symptoms of temperament, except just that
temperament of having no temperament, which seemed to him the only one
permissible to an artist, who, as he said, was nothing if not simply
either a recorder or a weaver of beautiful lines in the air.
Record and design, statement and decoration--these, in combination,
constituted creation! It was to him a certain source of pleasure that
he had discovered this. Not that he was, of course, neglectful of
sensations, but he was perfectly careful not to _feel_ them--in order
that he might be able to record them, or use them for his weaving in
a purely æsthetic manner. The moment they impinged on his spirit, and
sent the blood to his head, he reined in, and began tracing lines in
the air, a practice that never failed him.
It was his deliberate opinion that a work of art quite as great as
the “Bacchus and Ariadne” could be made out of a kettle singing on
a hob. You had merely to record it with beautiful lines and colour;
and what--in parenthesis--could lend itself more readily to beautiful
treatment of lines woven in the air than steam rising from a spout?
It was a subject, too, which in its very essence almost precluded
temperamental treatment, so that this abiding temptation was removed
from the creator. It could be transferred to canvas with a sort of
immortal blandness--black, singing, beautiful. All that cant, such
as, “The greater the artist’s spirit, the greater the subject he will
treat, and the greater achievement attain, technique being equal,”
was to him beneath contempt. The spirit did not matter, because one
must not intrude it; and, since one must not intrude it, the more
unpretentious the subject, the less temptation one had to diverge from
impersonality, that first principle of art. Oranges on a dish afforded
probably the finest subject one could meet with; unless one chanced to
dislike oranges. As for what people called “criticism of life,” he
maintained that such was only permissible when the criticism was so
sunk into the very fibre of a work as to be imperceptible to the most
searching eye. When this was achieved he thought it extremely valuable.
Anything else was simply the work of the moralist, of the man who took
sides and used his powers of expression to embody a temperamental and
therefore an obviously one-sided view of his subject; and, however
high those powers of expression might be, he could not admit that this
was in any sense real art. He could never forgive Leonardo da Vinci,
because, he said, “the fellow was always trying to put the scientific
side of himself into his confounded paintings, and not just content to
render faithfully in terms of decoration”; nor could he ever condone
Euripides for letting his philosophy tincture his plays. And, if it
were advanced that the former was the greatest painter and the latter
the greatest dramatist the world had ever seen, he would say: “That may
be, but they weren’t artists, of course.”
He was fond of the words “of course”; they gave the impression that
he could not be startled, as was right and proper for a man occupying
his post, a little nearer to the Creative Purpose than those others.
As mark of that position, he always permitted himself just one
eccentricity, changing it every year, his mind being subtle--not like
those of certain politicians or millionaires, content to wear orchids
or drive zebras all their lives. Anon it would be a little pointed
beard and no hair to speak of; next year, no beard, and wings; the year
after, a pair of pince-nez with alabaster rims, very cunning; once more
anon, a little pointed beard. In these ways he singled himself out just
enough, no more; for he was no _poseur_, believing in his own place in
the scheme of things too deeply.
His views on matters of the day varied, of course, with the views of
those he talked to, since it was his privilege always to see either the
other side or something so much more subtle on the same side as made
that side the other.
But all topical thought and emotion was beside the point for one who
lived in his work; who lived to receive impressions and render them
again so faithfully that you could not tell he had ever received them.
His was--as he sometimes felt--a rare and precious personality.