In point of fact, I met Strickland before I had been a fortnight in
Paris.
I quickly found myself a tiny apartment on the fifth floor of a house
in the Rue des Dames, and for a couple of hundred francs bought at a
second-hand dealer’s enough furniture to make it habitable. I arranged
with the concierge to make my coffee in the morning and to keep the
place clean. Then I went to see my friend Dirk Stroeve.
Dirk Stroeve was one of those persons whom, according to your
character, you cannot think of without derisive laughter or an
embarrassed shrug of the shoulders. Nature had made him a buffoon. He
was a painter, but a very bad one, whom I had met in Rome, and I still
remembered his pictures. He had a genuine enthusiasm for the
commonplace. His soul palpitating with love of art, he painted the
models who hung about the stairway of Bernini in the Piazza de Spagna,
undaunted by their obvious picturesqueness; and his studio was full of
canvases on which were portrayed moustachioed, large-eyed peasants in
peaked hats, urchins in becoming rags, and women in bright petticoats.
Sometimes they lounged at the steps of a church, and sometimes dallied
among cypresses against a cloudless sky; sometimes they made love by a
Renaissance well-head, and sometimes they wandered through the Campagna
by the side of an ox-waggon. They were carefully drawn and carefully
painted. A photograph could not have been more exact. One of the
painters at the Villa Medici had called him _Le Maître de la Boîte à
Chocolats._ To look at his pictures you would have thought that Monet,
Manet, and the rest of the Impressionists had never been.
“I don’t pretend to be a great painter,” he said, “I’m not a Michael
Angelo, no, but I have something. I sell. I bring romance into the
homes of all sorts of people. Do you know, they buy my pictures not
only in Holland, but in Norway and Sweden and Denmark? It’s mostly
merchants who buy them, and rich tradesmen. You can’t imagine what the
winters are like in those countries, so long and dark and cold. They
like to think that Italy is like my pictures. That’s what they expect.
That’s what I expected Italy to be before I came here.”
And I think that was the vision that had remained with him always,
dazzling his eyes so that he could not see the truth; and
notwithstanding the brutality of fact, he continued to see with the
eyes of the spirit an Italy of romantic brigands and picturesque ruins.
It was an ideal that he painted—a poor one, common and shop-soiled, but
still it was an ideal; and it gave his character a peculiar charm.
It was because I felt this that Dirk Stroeve was not to me, as to
others, merely an object of ridicule. His fellow-painters made no
secret of their contempt for his work, but he earned a fair amount of
money, and they did not hesitate to make free use of his purse. He was
generous, and the needy, laughing at him because he believed so naively
their stories of distress, borrowed from him with effrontery. He was
very emotional, yet his feeling, so easily aroused, had in it something
absurd, so that you accepted his kindness, but felt no gratitude. To
take money from him was like robbing a child, and you despised him
because he was so foolish. I imagine that a pickpocket, proud of his
light fingers, must feel a sort of indignation with the careless woman
who leaves in a cab a vanity-bag with all her jewels in it. Nature had
made him a butt, but had denied him insensibility. He writhed under the
jokes, practical and otherwise, which were perpetually made at his
expense, and yet never ceased, it seemed wilfully, to expose himself to
them. He was constantly wounded, and yet his good-nature was such that
he could not bear malice: the viper might sting him, but he never
learned by experience, and had no sooner recovered from his pain than
he tenderly placed it once more in his bosom. His life was a tragedy
written in the terms of knockabout farce. Because I did not laugh at
him he was grateful to me, and he used to pour into my sympathetic ear
the long list of his troubles. The saddest thing about them was that
they were grotesque, and the more pathetic they were, the more you
wanted to laugh.
But though so bad a painter, he had a very delicate feeling for art,
and to go with him to picture-galleries was a rare treat. His
enthusiasm was sincere and his criticism acute. He was catholic. He had
not only a true appreciation of the old masters, but sympathy with the
moderns. He was quick to discover talent, and his praise was generous.
I think I have never known a man whose judgment was surer. And he was
better educated than most painters. He was not, like most of them,
ignorant of kindred arts, and his taste for music and literature gave
depth and variety to his comprehension of painting. To a young man like
myself his advice and guidance were of incomparable value.
When I left Rome I corresponded with him, and about once in two months
received from him long letters in queer English, which brought before
me vividly his spluttering, enthusiastic, gesticulating conversation.
Some time before I went to Paris he had married an Englishwoman, and
was now settled in a studio in Montmartre. I had not seen him for four
years, and had never met his wife.