I am almost too comfortable with Mrs. Bobby. In fact I wished to be
just a little miserable in Belvern, so that I could paint with a frenzy.
Sometimes, when I have been in a state of almost despairing loneliness
and gloom, the colours have glowed on my canvas and the lines have
shaped themselves under my hand independent of my own volition. Now,
tucked away in a corner of my consciousness is the knowledge that I need
never be lonely again unless I choose. When I yield myself fully to the
sweet enchantment of this thought, I feel myself in the mood to paint
sunshine, flowers, and happy children's faces; yet I am sadly lacking
in concentration, all the same. The fact is, I am no artist in the true
sense of the word. My hope flies ever in front of my best success, and
that momentary success does not deceive me in the very least. I know
exactly how much, or rather how little, I am worth; that I lack the
imagination, the industry, the training, the ambition, to achieve any
lasting results. I have the artistic temperament in so far that it is
impossible for me to work merely for money or popularity, or indeed for
anything less than the desire to express the best that is in me without
fear or favour. It would never occur to me to trade on present approval
and dash off unworthy stuff while I have command of the market. I am
quite above all that, but I am distinctly below that other mental and
spiritual level where art is enough; where pleasure does not signify;
where one shuts oneself up and produces from sheer necessity; where one
is compelled by relentless law; where sacrifice does not count; where
ideas throng the brain and plead for release in expression; where effort
is joy, and the prospect of doing something enduring lures the soul on
to new and ever new endeavour: so I shall never be rich or famous.
What shall I paint to-day? Shall it be the bit of garden underneath my
window, with the tangle of pinks and roses, and the cabbages growing
appetisingly beside the sweet-williams, the woodbine climbing over the
brown stone wall, the wicket-gate, and the cherry-tree with its fruit
hanging red against the whitewashed cottage? Ah, if I could only paint
it so truly that you could hear the drowsy hum of the bees among the
thyme, and smell the scented hay-meadows in the distance, and feel that
it is midsummer in England! That would indeed be truth, and that would
be art. Shall I paint the Bobby baby as he stoops to pick the cowslips
and the flax, his head as yellow and his eyes as blue as the flowers
themselves; or that bank opposite the gate, with its gorse bushes in
golden bloom, its mountain-ash hung with scarlet berries, its tufts
of harebells blossoming in the crevices of rock, and the quaint low
clock-tower at the foot? Can I not paint all these in the full glow of
summer-time in my secret heart whenever I open the door a bit and admit
its life-giving warmth and beauty? I think I can, if I can only quit
dreaming.
I wonder how the great artists worked, and under what circumstances
they threw aside the implements of their craft, impatient of all but
the throb of life itself? Could Raphael paint Madonnas the week of his
betrothal? Did Thackeray write a chapter the day his daughter was
born? Did Plato philosophise freely when he was in love? Were there
interruptions in the world's great revolutions, histories, dramas,
reforms, poems, and marbles when their creators fell for a brief moment
under the spell of the little blind tyrant who makes slaves of us all?
It must have been so. Your chronometer heart, on whose pulsations you
can reckon as on the procession of the equinoxes, never gave anything to
the world unless it were a system of diet, or something quite uncoloured
and unglorified by the imagination.