Her stranger from Rubes' land was a great man in a certain world. He had
become great when young, which is perhaps a misfortune. It indisposes men
to be great at their maturity. He was famous at twenty, by a picture
hectic in color, perfect in drawing, that made Paris at his feet. He
became more famous by verses, by plays, by political follies, and by
social successes. He was faithful, however, to his first love in art. He
was a great painter, and year by year proved afresh the cunning of his
hand. Purists said his pictures had no soul in them. It was not wonderful
if they had none. He always painted soulless vice; indeed, he saw very
little else.
One year he had some political trouble. He wrote a witty pamphlet that
hurt where it was perilous to aim. He laughed and crossed the border,
riding into the green Ardennes one sunny evening. He had a name of some
power and sufficient wealth; he did not feel long exile. Meanwhile he
told himself he would go and look at Scheffer's Gretchen.
The King of Thule is better; but people talk most of the Gretchen. He had
never seen either.
He went in leisurely, travelling up the bright Meuse River, and across
the monotony of the plains, then green with wheat a foot high, and
musical with the many bells of the Easter kermesses in the quaint
old-world villages.
There was something so novel, so sleepy, so harmless, so mediaeval, in
the Flemish life, that it soothed him. He had been swimming all his
life in salt sea-fed rapids; this sluggish, dull, canal water, mirroring
between its rushes a life that had scarcely changed for centuries, had a
charm for him.
He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town is ugly and beautiful; it is like
a dull quaint grés de Flandre jug, that has precious stones set inside
its rim. It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels, of sale and barter,
of loss and gain; but in the heart of it there are illuminated leaves of
missal vellum, all gold and color, and monkish story and heroic ballad,
that could only have been executed in the days when Art was a religion.
He gazed himself into an homage of Rubens, whom before he had slighted,
never having known (for, unless you have seen Antwerp, it is as absurd to
say that you have seen Rubens, as it is to think that you have seen
Murillo out of Seville, or Raffaelle out of Rome); and he studied the
Gretchen carefully, delicately, sympathetically, for he loved Scheffer;
but though he tried, he failed to care for her.
"She is only a peasant; she is not a poem," he said to himself; "I will
paint a Gretchen for the Salon of next year."
But it was hard for him to portray a Gretchen. All his pictures were
Phryne,--Phryne in triumph, in ruin, in a palace, in a poor-house, on a
bed of roses, on a hospital mattress; Phryne laughing with a belt of
jewels about her supple waist; Phryne lying with the stones of the
dead-house under her naked limbs,--but always Phryne. Phryne, who living
had death in her smile; Phryne, who lifeless had blank despair on her
face; Phryne, a thing that lived furiously every second of her days, but
Phryne a thing that once being dead was carrion that never could live
again.
Phryne has many painters in this school, as many as Catherine and Cecilia
had in the schools of the Renaissance, and he was chief amidst them.
How could he paint Gretchen if the pure Scheffer missed? Not even if,
like the artist monks of old, he steeped his brushes all Lent through in
holy water.
And in holy water he did not believe.
One evening, having left Antwerpen ringing its innumerable bells over the
grave of its dead Art, he leaned out of the casement of an absent
friend's old palace in the Brabant street that is named after Mary of
Burgundy; an old casement crusted with quaint carvings, and gilded round
in Spanish fashion, with many gargoyles and griffins, and illegible
scutcheons.
Leaning there, wondering with himself whether he would wait awhile and
paint quietly in this dim street, haunted with the shades of Memling and
Maes, and Otto Veneris and Philip de Champagne, or whether he would go
into the East and seek new types, and lie under the red Egyptian heavens
and create a true Cleopatra, which no man has ever done yet,--young
Cleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and fresh from Cæsar's kisses,--leaning
there, he saw a little peasant go by below, with two little white feet in
two wooden shoes, and a face that had the pure and simple radiance of a
flower.
"There is my Gretchen," he thought to himself, and went down and followed
her into the cathedral. If he could get what was in her face, he would
get what Scheffer could not.
A little later walking by her in the green lanes, he meditated, "It is
the face of Gretchen, but not the soul--the Red Mouse has never passed
this child's lips. Nevertheless--"
"Nevertheless--" he said to himself, and smiled.
For he, the painter all his life long of Phryne living and of Phryne
dead, believed that every daughter of Eve either vomits the Red Mouse
or swallows it.
It makes so little difference which,--either way the Red Mouse has been
there the evening towards this little rush-covered hut, he forgot the Red
Mouse, and began vaguely to see that there are creatures of his mother's
sex from whom the beast of the Brocken slinks away.
But he still said to himself, "Nevertheless." "Nevertheless,"--for he
knew well that when the steel cuts the silk, when the hound hunts the
fawn, when the snake wooes the bird, when the king covets the vineyard,
there is only one end possible at any time. It is the strong against the
weak, the fierce against the feeble, the subtle against the simple, the
master against the slave; there is no equality in the contest and no
justice--it is merely inevitable, and the issue of it is written.