Tom had spent the latter part of the summer and the earlier autumn at a
sculptor’s studio in Paris, and arrived at Athens in a decade of summer
November days. The fogs and frosts had laid a hand on Paris before he
left, and the new heaven and the new earth looked very fair as his ship
steamed slowly into the Piræus just before sunrise. The violet crown of
mountains round Athens lay in dewy silence waiting for the dawn, and
even in the dim half light the air was full of southern colour. He stood
on the deck until the sun had shot up above Pentelicus, and was joined
by Arthur Wrexham, who had secured a month’s extra leave, on a vague
plea of debility.
“It’s so delicious to be in these classic waters again,” said that
diplomatist. “England had become quite unbearably foggy. Cook’s man will
get us a boat.”
“What’s that mountain?” asked Tom peremptorily--“that one, just where
the sun has risen.”
Arthur Wrexham looked vaguely in the direction of the sun.
“Oh, it’s Hymettus, I think, but I’m not sure. I’ve no head for these
barbarous names. Have you got all your things together? Do you see
Cook’s man anywhere? They all talk Greek here.”
A medley of boats full of picturesque Southerners was waiting below,
offering to take any one on shore at a ridiculously low figure, and in
wholly unintelligible language.
“It’s no use waiting for Cook’s man,” said Tom; “let’s get one of these
brown ruffians to take us ashore.”
“If you’ll talk to him, and tell him we will only pay a fifth part of
what he wants, we will,” said Arthur Wrexham, “but I can’t understand
them.”
Tom found his way up to the Acropolis during the morning, and suspended
judgment. The whole thing was so transcendently beautiful that he could
not endorse his own prophecies that it would be obsolete, and since
obsolete, disappointing. He planted himself on the Propylæa steps for
half an hour, and looked out from between a frame of marble pillars
stained to the richest orange with wind and rain over the Attic plain,
across the sea towards Salamis and Ægina. The sky, one blue, touched
another blue on the horizon, and melted the edges of capes and
mountains.
To the right, across the grey-green olive grove far below, rose the
swelling mass of Parnes, fringed with pine woods, and a white village
nestled on its lower slopes. Close on his right stood the hill
Areopagus, with steps and caves cut in its brown-red sides. The wind,
blowing lightly from the west, seemed full of dead memories of tiresome
books, coming back to life and beauty. After that he sat for a time in
front of the west façade of the Parthenon, which stood like some
gracious presiding presence keeping watch over the town and the plain.
High up on the pediment still rested the figure of a man and woman, she
with her arm round him, he leaning against her breast, and behind the
first row of columns rose the line of frieze showing the youth of Athens
making their horses ready to start in the great birthday procession of
the goddess. To the left stood the marble maidens, holding for ever on
their heads the roof of the south porch of the Erecththeum, yet bearing
it as no burden has yet been borne. One with her right knee bent, and
hands loose by her side, stood as if she could have borne the weight of
the world, and yet not been weary, and another like her, as a sister is
like a sister, seemed just to have shifted her position, to have drawn
the right foot back, and clasped her hands behind her. Between the more
roughly cut blocks of foundation stones sprang vivid flowers, and the
fallen columns of the great temple lay at rest on beds of long wavy
grasses. High in the eastern heavens sat Pentelicus and Hymettus, two
mountains of marble, and the quarries from which Athens had been built
from generation to generation showed only like a couple of tiny
scratches in their long flanks. Then looking over the east wall of the
Acropolis, he saw the modern town spread out beneath him, with sober,
grave cypresses keeping sentinel by the tower of the winds, or a little
to the right that sad company of giants, the remaining columns of the
temple of Zeus Olympios, standing like strange, tall men from some other
land, gazed at by the crowd of inquisitive modern houses, that keep on
pushing their way closer to them. After lunch he went to the museums and
saw the lines of statues and reliefs, and said nothing. He went to the
Street of Tombs, and saw other tomb reliefs standing as they had stood
for two thousand years, under the deep blue of the southern sky, so
placed that the grasses that sprang from their ashes budded and flowered
in sight of the Acropolis; and the decade of summer days passed away.
An easterly gale and floods of driving rain kept him indoors one
morning, and he wrote to Markham. An extract from his letter will give
the state of his feelings better than anything else.
“I have been here between a week and a fortnight,” he wrote, “and I am
no nearer making up my mind than I was at first. If the beauty of the
whole place was not so overwhelming, I should have merely, as I expected
to do, studied how the sculptors of that day rendered muscles, and
examined the _technique_ of their work. As it is, I have done nothing of
the kind. Now and then when I am tired I suddenly remember the absolute
perfection of some detail, but in general I don’t consciously notice it.
The art is so triumphant that one cannot look at it in pieces. Men
_admired_ the sun before they peered at him through telescopes and found
out sun-spots, and it was not till after that they tried to explain the
sun-spots. It is the same with me; I can only look and wonder. An
Englishman has offered very kindly to lend me some books about
sculpture. The suddenness of my refusal startled him. I care nothing at
present about schools, and the way one man rendered eyes and another
rendered hair. I can’t judge it yet. But if they will build a temple of
Pentelic marble in London, and stain it orange and red with weather, and
put a hollow turquoise over it for a sky, and the Ionian Sea the colour
of a sapphire in the background, I will do a statue for it. Some one
told me once that I was not ambitious! Do you agree with that verdict?
To-morrow if it is fine I go to Olympia. There is the finest thing of
all there--a Hermes by Praxiteles. I don’t think either Praxiteles or
Hermes come into your line. One was a god, and I rather expect to find
that the other was too.”
From an artistic standpoint that visit to Olympia was perhaps the making
of Tom; for all financial purposes it was his ruin. When he saw it, he
said, “By Gad!” and stopped there half a day. The young god stands with
his head a little bent, and a smile on his lips, looking at the babe
whom he carries on his arm, half lost in his own thoughts. And the
divine fire descended on Tom.
He stopped at Olympia for a day and a half, and then returned to Athens.
Another artist had arrived at his hotel a day or two before, rather to
Tom’s disgust, but he quickly made friends with him, and had left with
him several photographs of a couple of statuettes he had made that
autumn in England. They were extremely pretty and essentially modern in
style. Manvers himself was of the most advanced realistic school, and
had got past mere prettiness, and recorded sheer ugliness with the most
amazing skill. He worked a good deal in Paris, but had come south owing
to ill-health, and found a cynical pleasure in watching Tom’s enthusiasm
for a school that was almost comically _passé_, as _passé_ as crinoline.
He had been through the same stage himself.
He had looked at the photographs Tom had given him with a good deal of
respect, and was turning them over for the third or fourth time, when
Tom himself came into the room on his return from Olympia. Manvers was
lying at full length on a sofa, smoking a bitter weed.
“Ah, there you are!” he said. “Do you know these are devilish pretty?”
Tom strode across the room, and when he saw what Manvers was looking at,
he frowned.
“Give them me, Manvers,” he said, and twitched them out of his hand.
It was a damp, windy day, and Manvers, who hated any temperature but the
warmest, had made the hotel proprietor light a fire in the smoking-room.
Tom looked at the photographs for a moment with intense disgust, and
threw them into the fire. In a few moments the draught had carried a few
fragments of crinkly ash up the chimney.
Manvers took a puff or two at his bitter weed.
“Ah! the Hermes is to blame for that, I suppose,” he said. “I’ve seen
the photographs of it. That is why I did not go to Olympia with you.
Partly also, because it is cold. I’m sorry you threw those photographs
away; they were very pretty.”
“They were abominations,” said Tom, and sat down.
“And so you are going to set up a very life-size Apollo--six foot four
in his sandals--as I did,” said Manvers, “and you will gnash your teeth
over it every day for a month, and then you will return to your senses.”
“For the first time in my life I am fully sane,” said Tom. “I have seen
perfection, and I know what it means. I shall find out the way to do it.
Don’t laugh--I shall. It won’t be easy, but it can be done. It has been
done once, and it can be done again. What a blind fool I have been!”
Manvers crossed one leg over the other.
“Yes, it’s delicious to feel like that,” he said. “I quite envy you. I
felt like it once--and those things don’t happen twice. I congratulate
you with all my heart, and I shall congratulate you more when you have
recovered.”
Tom snorted with indignation.
“I am as sane as you are,” he said, “but I shan’t set up a life-size
statue just yet; I have got to study first. I know what the language
means, and I am going to read all that exists in it. I have got the key
to it all. The whole thing used to puzzle me; it was an unknown tongue,
obsolete and dead, I thought it. But now I have the means of finding it
all out.”
Manvers closed his eyes.
“_Nunc dimittis_,” he said piously. “I suppose we may expect a new Greek
god every year for the present. What will you do with them, by-the-by?
Life-size figures take up such a lot of room in a studio.”
“That’s so like you,” said Tom; “as if it matters anything to me what
happens to them. I shall produce them, that is enough.”
“So the rest of the world will think, as you will find.”
“What?”
“I mean they won’t go a step further, and wish to possess them.”
“My dear Manvers, what do I care?”
Manvers looked at him composedly.
“Yes, of course, it doesn’t matter to you just yet. But when the
masterpieces are fruitful and multiply (masterpieces breed like rabbits,
you know), you will begin to wonder by degrees why they are
unappreciated. You will be like a struggling curate with many children.
He loves them all, but he cannot help wondering wistfully what will
happen to them.”
Tom shook his head with an air of benign superiority.
“You don’t really think that, do you?”
“Ah, well, it would be driving the case to extremes. What I expect will
happen is that you will get tired of your masterpieces, or rather your
first masterpiece, long before the rest of the world has an opportunity
of doing so.”
Tom looked at him compassionately.
“Poor chap; of course you are _blasé_ and disillusioned. It must be very
uncomfortable.”
“From your point of view, I am, but not from my own. I saw a woman in
the streets to-day with high-heeled boots and a parasol with lace round
the edge, and the face of ... well, not of a fallen angel, but an angel
who never rose. To you that would mean nothing, but to me it was a solid
ingot of inspiration for terra-cotta tossed in my path. From my point of
view you are simply blind.”
“Long may I remain so!” remarked Tom. “There’s the bell for dinner. I am
not going to eat no dinner because the heavens are opened.”
“Did no manna fall into the railway carriage?” asked Manvers. “How
forgetful of the Olympians!”
“No, I had lunch at Corinth,” said Tom, laughing.
Whether Tom was sane or not, he was not sufficiently mad to set up a
life-size Apollo in his bedroom. The artist’s inspiration had descended
on him, but not at present the artist’s inevitable need of producing.
The inspiration had come in a flood, and he bathed in it; there would be
time enough afterwards to wade out and devote himself to the task of
utilizing a given amount of the water. He wandered about the museums,
and sat on the steps of the Parthenon, picturing to himself the two long
rows of statues which once led up from the gates, and turning to the
long riband of frieze on the west to people the path again with the
Panathenaic procession. They were gods, Athens was a city of gods, and
gods could not die; they were youth, beauty, enthusiasm all realized,
ready to be realized again. It was all very well for Manvers to talk
about phases, and developments, and schools that were _passées_, and
schools that were decadent, but when you are face to face with
perfection....
Such was his creed. He believed in beauty. Even the classics--Xenophon
with his parasangs, Thucydides with his Peloponnesian war--were
glorified. Those men had been of the beautiful race, they had lived in
the country where beauty unveiled had dwelt. They were to him as are, to
one seeking for his love, men met by the wayside, men with whom she has
spoken, on whom perhaps she smiled. They may not have known how fair she
was, but even they were men different from others, for they had seen
her, and could not be the same after that.
So he gave himself up heart and soul to his religion, and his religion
lay broadcast like manna; he sat in the Dionysiac theatre, and read
Aristophanes; he spelt out shorter Greek inscriptions with reverence; he
walked to Eleusis by the sacred way; he sat an hour on the barrow at
Marathon that holds the bones of the Greeks who conquered the Persians
and died in victory. If this is to be mad, it is a pleasant thing to be
mad, but it is a form of madness which is the outcome of youth and
enthusiasm, and possibly genius, and is therefore not so common or so
incurable as other forms.
Maud Wrexham’s anticipations about her visit to Athens were a good deal
heightened by the knowledge that she would find Tom Carlingford there.
They had met several times during the autumn in England, and she found
his company very stimulating. Tom above all things was an enthusiast,
and enthusiasts are usually very sympathetic people, because, having
seen unlimited vistas opening out in their own line they are willing,
even eager, to allow for unlimited vistas in any other. Maud’s vista was
a wide one, embracing all mankind, just in the same way as Tom’s did,
the difference lying in the fact that Tom meant to compass his ends by
artistic achievement, which would compel admiration and awe, whereas
Maud’s programme was entirely vague. She had a passion for the human
race, and intended that they should have a passion for her.
Tom and she, being already fairly intimate, saw a good deal of each
other. Maud, too, had experienced a quite peculiar pleasure in the sight
of the Acropolis, and Tom’s presence by no means lessened it.
They were sitting one bright winter’s day on the steps of the little
temple to Nike, which looks over the lower Attic plain, and across the
narrow sea to Ægina and Salamis, and Tom was feeling a new-found joy in
having some one to whom he could talk fully, being sure of sympathy.
Though his artist’s nature had not yet insisted on the life-size Apollo,
expression of some sort was becoming necessary to him.
He pointed towards Salamis.
“That’s where they smashed the Persian fleet,” he said, “and our Lady of
Victory was standing here where you and I are sitting. She used to be a
winged goddess, but when she saw that, she plucked off her wings, and
became the Wingless Victory. At least, that is my version. And here they
set her temple on high.”
Maud’s eyes sparkled, and she said nothing for a minute or two.
“I’m afraid I’m a pagan,” she remarked at length; “I believe in these
gods and goddesses.”
“Why, of course you do,” said Tom. “These myths could never have been
invented; they were a conviction. And a conviction is the only religion
worth having.”
“But doesn’t it matter what the conviction is?”
“No, certainly not. One man’s conviction may not be the conviction of
another man, or of any other man, but it is the true thing for him. A
man’s conviction is that for which he was made.”
“But don’t you believe in a time when every one, dead or alive, will
have the same conviction?”
“I hardly know. But at any given moment I can’t realize that it’s any
conviction which I don’t share at that moment.”
Maud flushed ever so faintly before she spoke again.
“What is your conviction at this moment?”
Tom looked at her seriously, and examined the ferrule of his stick
without speaking.
“What is yours?” he asked.
“Ah! but my question came first.”
“My conviction is that a man can realize either in others, or in some
image in his brain which he works out perfectly or imperfectly, ideal
beauty. It may be moral or physical beauty. And his mission is to do
it.”
Maud had waited for his answer with an anxiety she could hardly explain
to herself; her heart took upon itself to beat with quick throbs, that
seemed to make her whole being alert. But this was only half an answer.
“And what is he to do with it when he has realized it?” she asked, with
the same intentness.
“Surely that is enough,” said Tom. “He loves it, of course.”
He stood up and looked out over the sea. “My God! he loves nothing
else!” he added.
For the life of her Maud could not help questioning him further.
“Yes, that, of course. But here one is in this puzzling world, and how
is one to begin? My conviction is----”
“Yes, I know,” broke in Tom; “I remember you telling me perfectly. You
want to make the whole world yours. So do I; and here is my first step
ready for me.”
“Yes, you are an artist. That is a serviceable tool.”
“A tool? It is the end in itself. If you use it rightly, all the rest is
there. The mainspring of this civilization which we see here was beauty.
They conquered the Persians for the beauty of the thing.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure about that! I think their hearths and homes had
something to do with it.”
“Then why had no one else conquered the Persians? Every nation they had
already subdued had its hearths and homes. The Greeks had no more
hearths and homes than others, and the biceps of the Greek was no bigger
than that of other men. Everything else was only the wire down which the
electric current came--and the electric current which killed the Persian
was the love of art.”
“Then why did they fall before Rome?”
“Because the current had grown weak. Their art degenerated, and they
fell.”
Maud scratched the cement pavement at her feet meditatively. She felt
rather chilled and discouraged. She had expected--well, what had she
expected?
“I think you are inhuman,” she said at last.
“Yes, I know I am. I believe I have got hold of this tool, as you call
it, and I think of nothing else but how to use it. I must go back to
England soon, and work.”
Maud had stood up, and the least tremor passed over her. Tom noticed it.
“You are catching cold,” he said, “sitting here. What an ass I was not
to think of it before! Here’s your cloak; let me help you on with it.”
“Thanks--it is rather cold. I thought you were going to be out here all
the winter.”
“I feel just now that I should like to stop here for ever.”
They had strolled back into the Acropolis, and Maud felt glad they were
moving, for a silence then is less embarrassing than when one is
stopping still. Their talk had been a little upsetting to her in some
way, and she wanted a moment to steady herself in. They had left Arthur
Wrexham sitting in a rather forlorn manner on a large slab of cold
Pentelic marble. He refused to come on to the Nike bastion because he
was smoking a cigarette, and there was a wind there. So he contented
himself with answering in a vaguely appreciative manner, how very
classic it all was, and that he should certainly come there again. His
opportune appearance at this moment, sitting in a more sheltered corner
than ever, facing a blank white wall, gave Maud an opportunity of
recovering herself.
“Dear Arthur, are you finding it all very classic,” she said, “and just
a little melancholy? Never mind; we can’t take you to the museum, as we
threatened to do, because it closes at twelve, so you need only just
walk up as far as the Parthenon, because I want to look at something,
and then we’ll all go down. Really, you are a very bad chaperon; you
sit in a corner opposite a blank wall. Mr. Carlingford has been saying
the most unconventional things.”
“I have been mentioning the objects and purposes of art,” remarked Tom.
“Ah, how nice!” murmured Arthur; “all about Doric columns and so on, I
suppose. Do tell me some day. Maud, we shall be dreadfully late for
lunch.”
“Yes, dear, I know we shall,” said Maud.
“Well, then, wouldn’t it really be as well to leave the Parthenon alone,
just for the present? You can see the Parthenon any day.”
“Well, you can have lunch any day,” said Maud; “and you do have it every
day.”
Arthur Wrexham made a resigned little sound, partaking of the nature of
a sigh, and followed them.
They were lunching with Tom at his hotel, and when they went out on to
the balcony afterwards to drink the thick sweet Turkish coffee, they
found Manvers sitting in the sun, feeding on his own thoughts. The
thoughts chiefly ran on the subject of the possibility of representing
lace--real thin lace, and not great fluffy bunches of it--in
terra-cotta, and it really seemed as if it might be done. _La dame qui
s’amuse_ must have lace, all round her parasol and down the front of her
dress.
He looked doubtfully at his cigar, after shaking hands with Maud. The
class _qui m’ennuie_ were not so tolerant. Maud caught the glance.
“Not on my account, please,” said she. “I don’t mind it in the least.”
“Well, on my account, then,” said Tom. “He smokes curly Italian weeds,
Miss Wrexham. They smell of goat’s cheese.”
“My dear fellow,” said Manvers, “you are in the Havannah stage with all
your tastes.”
“Isn’t that rather a good stage to be in?” asked Miss Wrexham.
“Quite delightful for yourself, but it makes you a little intolerant of
other people. Tom dislikes my statuettes as much as he dislikes my
cigars.”
“I dislike them very much more,” said Tom fervently.
“There, you see--you may judge how much he loathes them.”
“Bring one out,” said Tom, “and see if Miss Wrexham doesn’t agree with
me.”
“I don’t carry my own statuettes about with me,” said Manvers; “one’s
own works are very bad company. When you have begun on your life-size
Apollo, you will know why.”
“Apollo shall dine with me every night.”
“My dear fellow, how you will bore each other!” said Manvers.
Maud Wrexham began to laugh.
“You mustn’t pea-shoot each other in public,” she said. “When doctors
disagree, they must do so out of hearing of their patient.”
“Are you a patient?” asked Manvers.
“Yes, under treatment. I have been on the Acropolis all the morning,
with my brother and Mr. Carlingford. You’re not a patient, are you,
Arthur?”
“It struck me I was very patient,” said he.
Maud reflected a moment.
“No, it’s not at all a good joke, dear; it’s not either good enough or
bad enough to be good.”
“Extremes meet, you know,” explained Tom.
“That’s why you and Mr. Manvers come and stay at the same hotel, I
suppose,” said she.
“We don’t often meet,” remarked Manvers. “Tom goes to the Acropolis, and
I sit on the balcony.”
“Then why did you come to Athens?” asked Maud; “surely there are better
balconies elsewhere.”
“He’s really becoming a convert,” said Tom; “he’s not so black as he
paints himself.”
“My dear Tom, I never paint myself, it is you who paint me; and to do
you justice, you paint me as black as you can.”
Poor Arthur Wrexham looked appealingly at the company.
“I think I shall go for a little stroll,” he said. “When are you likely
to be ready, Maud?”
Maud finished her coffee.
“I’m coming now,” she said. “Don’t forget to-morrow, Mr.
Carlingford--you call for us at nine.”
“They’re going up Pentelicus,” said Arthur plaintively; “I’m going too.”
Tom looked at him severely.
“Yes, it’s the one you told me was Hymettus,” he said. “It’s time you
went. You won’t confuse them again.”
“I didn’t confuse them before,” said Arthur. “You can’t confuse two
things, unless you know them both, and then mix them up. I didn’t know
either.”
“Well, you’ll know one after to-morrow,” said Maud encouragingly, “and
then you can get at the other by an exhaustive process.”