Looking back, I realise that what I have written about Charles
Strickland must seem very unsatisfactory. I have given incidents that
came to my knowledge, but they remain obscure because I do not know the
reasons that led to them. The strangest, Strickland’s determination to
become a painter, seems to be arbitrary; and though it must have had
causes in the circumstances of his life, I am ignorant of them. From
his own conversation I was able to glean nothing. If I were writing a
novel, rather than narrating such facts as I know of a curious
personality, I should have invented much to account for this change of
heart. I think I should have shown a strong vocation in boyhood,
crushed by the will of his father or sacrificed to the necessity of
earning a living; I should have pictured him impatient of the
restraints of life; and in the struggle between his passion for art and
the duties of his station I could have aroused sympathy for him. I
should so have made him a more imposing figure. Perhaps it would have
been possible to see in him a new Prometheus. There was here, maybe,
the opportunity for a modern version of the hero who for the good of
mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned. It is always a
moving subject.
On the other hand, I might have found his motives in the influence of
the married relation. There are a dozen ways in which this might be
managed. A latent gift might reveal itself on acquaintance with the
painters and writers whose society his wife sought; or domestic
incompatability might turn him upon himself; a love affair might fan
into bright flame a fire which I could have shown smouldering dimly in
his heart. I think then I should have drawn Mrs. Strickland quite
differently. I should have abandoned the facts and made her a nagging,
tiresome woman, or else a bigoted one with no sympathy for the claims
of the spirit. I should have made Strickland’s marriage a long torment
from which escape was the only possible issue. I think I should have
emphasised his patience with the unsuitable mate, and the compassion
which made him unwilling to throw off the yoke that oppressed him. I
should certainly have eliminated the children.
An effective story might also have been made by bringing him into
contact with some old painter whom the pressure of want or the desire
for commercial success had made false to the genius of his youth, and
who, seeing in Strickland the possibilities which himself had wasted,
influenced him to forsake all and follow the divine tyranny of art. I
think there would have been something ironic in the picture of the
successful old man, rich and honoured, living in another the life which
he, though knowing it was the better part, had not had the strength to
pursue.
The facts are much duller. Strickland, a boy fresh from school, went
into a broker’s office without any feeling of distaste. Until he
married he led the ordinary life of his fellows, gambling mildly on the
Exchange, interested to the extent of a sovereign or two on the result
of the Derby or the Oxford and Cambridge Race. I think he boxed a
little in his spare time. On his chimney-piece he had photographs of
Mrs. Langtry and Mary Anderson. He read _Punch_ and the _Sporting
Times_. He went to dances in Hampstead.
It matters less that for so long I should have lost sight of him. The
years during which he was struggling to acquire proficiency in a
difficult art were monotonous, and I do not know that there was
anything significant in the shifts to which he was put to earn enough
money to keep him. An account of them would be an account of the things
he had seen happen to other people. I do not think they had any effect
on his own character. He must have acquired experiences which would
form abundant material for a picaresque novel of modern Paris, but he
remained aloof, and judging from his conversation there was nothing in
those years that had made a particular impression on him. Perhaps when
he went to Paris he was too old to fall a victim to the glamour of his
environment. Strange as it may seem, he always appeared to me not only
practical, but immensely matter-of-fact. I suppose his life during this
period was romantic, but he certainly saw no romance in it. It may be
that in order to realise the romance of life you must have something of
the actor in you; and, capable of standing outside yourself, you must
be able to watch your actions with an interest at once detached and
absorbed. But no one was more single-minded than Strickland. I never
knew anyone who was less self-conscious. But it is unfortunate that I
can give no description of the arduous steps by which he reached such
mastery over his art as he ever acquired; for if I could show him
undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair
at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the
artist’s bitterest enemy, I might excite some sympathy for a
personality which, I am all too conscious, must appear singularly
devoid of charm. But I have nothing to go on. I never once saw
Strickland at work, nor do I know that anyone else did. He kept the
secret of his struggles to himself. If in the loneliness of his studio
he wrestled desperately with the Angel of the Lord he never allowed a
soul to divine his anguish.
When I come to his connection with Blanche Stroeve I am exasperated by
the fragmentariness of the facts at my disposal. To give my story
coherence I should describe the progress of their tragic union, but I
know nothing of the three months during which they lived together. I do
not know how they got on or what they talked about. After all, there
are twenty-four hours in the day, and the summits of emotion can only
be reached at rare intervals. I can only imagine how they passed the
rest of the time. While the light lasted and so long as Blanche’s
strength endured, I suppose that Strickland painted, and it must have
irritated her when she saw him absorbed in his work. As a mistress she
did not then exist for him, but only as a model; and then there were
long hours in which they lived side by side in silence. It must have
frightened her. When Strickland suggested that in her surrender to him
there was a sense of triumph over Dirk Stroeve, because he had come to
her help in her extremity, he opened the door to many a dark
conjecture. I hope it was not true. It seems to me rather horrible. But
who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those
who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions. When
Blanche saw that, notwithstanding his moments of passion, Strickland
remained aloof, she must have been filled with dismay, and even in
those moments I surmise that she realised that to him she was not an
individual, but an instrument of pleasure; he was a stranger still, and
she tried to bind him to herself with pathetic arts. She strove to
ensnare him with comfort and would not see that comfort meant nothing
to him. She was at pains to get him the things to eat that he liked,
and would not see that he was indifferent to food. She was afraid to
leave him alone. She pursued him with attentions, and when his passion
was dormant sought to excite it, for then at least she had the illusion
of holding him. Perhaps she knew with her intelligence that the chains
she forged only aroused his instinct of destruction, as the plate-glass
window makes your fingers itch for half a brick; but her heart,
incapable of reason, made her continue on a course she knew was fatal.
She must have been very unhappy. But the blindness of love led her to
believe what she wanted to be true, and her love was so great that it
seemed impossible to her that it should not in return awake an equal
love.
But my study of Strickland’s character suffers from a greater defect
than my ignorance of many facts. Because they were obvious and
striking, I have written of his relations to women; and yet they were
but an insignificant part of his life. It is an irony that they should
so tragically have affected others. His real life consisted of dreams
and of tremendously hard work.
Here lies the unreality of fiction. For in men, as a rule, love is but
an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day,
and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is
untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important
thing in the world, and they are not very interesting ones; even women,
with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for
them. They are flattered and excited by them, but have an uneasy
feeling that they are poor creatures. But even during the brief
intervals in which they are in love, men do other things which distract
their mind; the trades by which they earn their living engage their
attention; they are absorbed in sport; they can interest themselves in
art. For the most part, they keep their various activities in various
compartments, and they can pursue one to the temporary exclusion of the
other. They have a faculty of concentration on that which occupies them
at the moment, and it irks them if one encroaches on the other. As
lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all
day long, but men only at times.
With Strickland the sexual appetite took a very small place. It was
unimportant. It was irksome. His soul aimed elsewhither. He had violent
passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven
to an orgy of lust, but he hated the instincts that robbed him of his
self-possession. I think, even, he hated the inevitable partner in his
debauchery. When he had regained command over himself, he shuddered at
the sight of the woman he had enjoyed. His thoughts floated then
serenely in the empyrean, and he felt towards her the horror that
perhaps the painted butterfly, hovering about the flowers, feels to the
filthy chrysalis from which it has triumphantly emerged. I suppose that
art is a manifestation of the sexual instinct. It is the same emotion
which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the
Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the _Entombment_ of Titian. It
is possible that Strickland hated the normal release of sex because it
seemed to him brutal by comparison with the satisfaction of artistic
creation. It seems strange even to myself, when I have described a man
who was cruel, selfish, brutal and sensual, to say that he was a great
idealist. The fact remains.
He lived more poorly than an artisan. He worked harder. He cared
nothing for those things which with most people make life gracious and
beautiful. He was indifferent to money. He cared nothing about fame.
You cannot praise him because he resisted the temptation to make any of
those compromises with the world which most of us yield to. He had no
such temptation. It never entered his head that compromise was
possible. He lived in Paris more lonely than an anchorite in the
deserts of Thebes. He asked nothing his fellows except that they should
leave him alone. He was single-hearted in his aim, and to pursue it he
was willing to sacrifice not only himself—many can do that—but others.
He had a vision.
Strickland was an odious man, but I still think he was a great one.