'By Jove!' I exclaimed, pointing to a vase. 'What a body!'
He was enchanted by my enthusiasm.
'Funny you should have hit on that,' said he. 'Old Daddy Perkins always
called it his ewe-lamb.'
Thus spoken, the name of the greatest authority on Wedgwood ware that
Europe has ever known curiously impressed me.
'I suppose you knew him?' I questioned.
'Considering that I was one of the pall-bearers at his funeral, and
caught the champion cold of my life!'
'What sort of a man was he?'
'Outside Wedgwood ware he wasn't any sort of a man. He was that scourge
of society, a philanthropist,' said Mr Brindley. 'He was an upright
citizen, and two thousand people followed him to his grave. I'm an
upright citizen, but I have no hope that two thousand people will
follow me to my grave.'
'You never know what may happen,' I observed, smiling.
'No.' He shook his head. 'If you undermine the moral character of your
fellow-citizens by a long course of unbridled miscellaneous
philanthropy, you can have a funeral procession as long as you like, at
the rate of about forty shillings a foot. But you'll never touch the
great heart of the enlightened public of these boroughs in any other
way. Do you imagine anyone cared a twopenny damn for Perkins's Wedgwood
ware?'
'It's like that everywhere,' I said.
'I suppose it is,' he assented unwillingly.
Who can tell what was passing in the breast of Mr Brindley? I could
not. At least I could not tell with any precision. I could only gather,
vaguely, that what he considered the wrong-headedness, the blindness,
the lack of true perception, of his public was beginning to produce in
his individuality a faint trace of permanent soreness. I regretted it.
And I showed my sympathy with him by asking questions about the design
and construction of the museum (a late addition to the Institution), of
which I happened to know that he had been the architect.
He at once became interested and interesting. Although he perhaps
insisted a little too much on the difficulties which occur when
original talent encounters stupidity, he did, as he walked me up and
down, contrive to convey to me a notion of the creative processes of
the architect in a way that was in my experience entirely novel. He was
impressing me anew, and I was wondering whether he was unique of his
kind or whether there existed regiments of him in this strange parcel
of England.
'Now, you see this girder,' he said, looking upwards.
That's surely something of Fuge's, isn't it?' I asked, indicating a
small picture in a corner, after he had finished his explanation of the
functions of the girder.
As on the walls of the staircase and corridors, so on the walls here,
there were many paintings, drawings, and engravings. And of course the
best were here in the museum. The least uninteresting items of the
collection were, speaking generally, reproductions in monotint of
celebrated works, and a few second--or third-rate loan pictures from
South Kensington. Aside from such matters I had noticed nothing but the
usual local trivialities, gifts from one citizen or another,
travel-jottings of some art-master, careful daubs of apt students
without a sense of humour. The aspect of the place was exactly the
customary aspect of the small provincial museum, as I have seen it in
half-a-hundred towns that are not among 'the great towns'. It had the
terrible trite 'museum' aspect, the aspect that brings woe and
desolation to the heart of the stoutest visitor, and which seems to
form part of the purgatorio of Bank-holidays, wide mouths, and stiff
clothes. The movement for opening museums on Sundays is the most
natural movement that could be conceived. For if ever a resort was
invented and fore-ordained to chime with the true spirit of the British
sabbath, that resort is the average museum. I ought to know. I do know.
But there was the incomparable Wedgwood ware, and there was the little
picture by Simon Fuge. I am not going to lose my sense of perspective
concerning Simon Fuge. He was not the greatest painter that ever lived,
or even of his time. He had, I am ready to believe, very grave
limitations. But he was a painter by himself, as all fine painters are.
He had his own vision. He was Unique. He was exclusively preoccupied
with the beauty and the romance of the authentic. The little picture
showed all this. It was a painting, unfinished, of a girl standing at a
door and evidently hesitating whether to open the door or not: a very
young girl, very thin, with long legs in black stockings, and short,
white, untidy frock; thin bare arms; the head thrown on one side, and
the hands raised, and one foot raised, in a wonderful childish
gesture--the gesture of an undecided fox-terrier. The face was an
infant's face, utterly innocent; and yet Simon Fuge had somehow caught
in that face a glimpse of all the future of the woman that the girl was
to be, he had displayed with exquisite insolence the essential
naughtiness of his vision of things. The thing was not much more than a
sketch; it was a happy accident, perhaps, in some day's work of Simon
Fuge's. But it was genius. When once you had yielded to it, there was
no other picture in the room. It killed everything else. But, wherever
it had found itself, nothing could have killed IT. Its success was
undeniable, indestructible. And it glowed sombrely there on the wall, a
few splashes of colour on a morsel of canvas, and it was Simon Fuge's
unconscious, proud challenge to the Five Towns. It WAS Simon Fuge, at
any rate all of Simon Fuge that was worth having, masterful,
imperishable. And not merely was it his challenge, it was his scorn,
his aristocratic disdain, his positive assurance that in the battle
between them he had annihilated the Five Towns. It hung there in the
very midst thereof, calmly and contemptuously waiting for the
acknowledgement of his victory.
'Which?' said Mr Brindley.