That evening after dinner I deliberately tempted the Providence
which had offered me Fifine as a mild mental stimulant. There were
several of my paintings hanging on the walls of the sitting-room, and,
when I followed her in thither, I found her standing meditatively,
cigarette in hand, before one of them. I came and stood behind her.
“Ah!” I said, “that is one of the things in which I successfully hid
from you what my choice of your dress revealed.”
She turned and looked me quite frankly and coolly in the face.
“What is it all about?” she said.
“Call it,” I answered, “a psychologic exercise in paint.”
“Then it is not a picture?”
“O! yes it is--or at least I hope so.”
“But--” she shook her head--“I do not understand. A picture is a
picture, and a sum is a sum, and a psychologic exercise is a
psychologic exercise.”
“You mean they are not assimilable terms. What, then, is your
definition of a picture?”
She considered, drawing thoughtfully at her cigarette.
“I think,” she said presently, “it is art--just that.”
“Well, what is art?”
Again she considered, and answered, “Form.”
“Form is an elusive term,” I said, “impossible of hard and fast
definition. There is no way of proving that any two of us agree about
it--no way of ascertaining that our mental and material optics come to
the same conclusion with regard to it.”
“Then why should you expect people to take your view of it, in--in a
thing like this?”
“I don’t--in a thing like this. I merely utter my protest in the thing
against the accepted conventions of form. It is an impression,
conveyed and caught through atmospheric vibration, of what form
actually suggested, at that particular moment, in that particular
instance, to my individual temperament.”
“I think,” she said calmly, after a pause, “that that is nonsense.”
“What,” I demanded, astonished, “is nonsense?”
“All that talk about impressions and individual temperaments. It is
only an excuse for idleness--for trying the short cut to laborious
ends. It is so much easier to spend an hour over a picture--over a
canvas--than a month. A burglar might claim just the same excuse for
stealing a year’s income in a night, instead of earning it in a year.
Besides, if your temperament is individual, what is the good of trying
to impose it on people who have individual temperaments of their own.
You can’t expect them to understand you; so what is the good?”
“None,” I said briefly--and grimly. This “mild mental stimulant” was
beginning to reveal itself a headier posset than I had ever dreamed it
to be.
“Then,” she answered, “why do you protest? You know you said you did.”
“As a revolutionist, I am bound to,” I replied weakly.
“A revolutionist from what?”
“From stereotype and standards. Standards are for yard measures, and
bushel measures, and other such commercial or scientific essentials.
They are not for art.”
“Why not?”
“O, Cousin! See to what they have led us--the lifeless petrifactions
of the schools and academies.”
“Well, they are art, if they are bad art. And there will always be bad
art and bad artists. But _you_ want to lead us away from art
altogether--into psychologic exercises--impressions that only you can
understand. Do you paint for yourself alone, then? In that case why do
you complain of your lack of appreciation?”
“I don’t.”
“O, you do! I know it from Mademoiselle your sister. You are very
humorous and philosophical, but you are hurt in your heart that the
world will not comprehend you better. I have seen _pictures_ by those
who think like you--Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse--and I suppose, if they
did not _feel_ like you, that they would hardly exhibit in public
galleries impressions which were just peculiar to themselves, and
impossible of understanding by others differently constituted.”
Why should she _not_ have seen them, these mutinous ones? Why, on the
other hand, had I admitted this viper to my hearth?
“I, too, have exhibited in public galleries,” I said, “and found
sympathy and understanding among the elect.”
“Well, who elected them?” she said--“themselves? There are always to
be found inconsiderable people to applaud what they don’t understand.
A little man blowing a big trumpet gets some of the credit for the
noise, you see.”
“But they did understand.”
“They couldn’t, you know, if we all see with different eyes.”
“O, this is puerile!” I cried, with a little shrug and laugh. “You
don’t like my pictures, or what I call pictures. Very well, then, you
don’t.”
“I think they are stuff and nonsense,” she answered, turning away from
the wall. “But I _do_ like your little mother: she is a real darling.”
She was lying in a corner, unfinished--my little clay model of
startled yet innocent maternity.
“O! you like that!” I said, a solacing glow about my heart.
“You needn’t sneer,” she answered. “Why didn’t your atmospheric
vibrations make a shapeless jelly of her too?”
“That is different. You must allow for the medium.”
“I don’t. There should be only one rule in Art, I am sure. What
applies to this applies to all; and it amounts in the end to form.
Everyone with the right eyes knows what beauty of form means. You do
yourself, you see; and yet you can go and paint those pictures.”
“O, for heaven’s sake leave my pictures alone!”
“You shouldn’t raise your voice. It squeaks and cracks when you do.
I’m sure I’ll leave them alone with pleasure.” But she couldn’t. “I’m
glad anyhow,” she said, “that _I_ don’t see things, even for a moment,
as if they were all made up of one huge nettlerash.”
Poor Pissarro, with his light analyses and colour vibrations! I was
bound to feel very small; but I could not help sniggering over the
impudent candour of this hussy. She turned, and dropped the butt of
her cigarette into a brass pot, and went silently scrutinising the
“things” along the walls. Presently she stopped before a little framed
piece, an interior with figures, very rich and sombre in tone, but
made cloudier than its due by the dirty state of the glass.
“O, I like that!” she said--“I _do_ like that. I think you must be an
artist after all. Why do you not always paint in that way?”
“Every producer, you know, has his own best for enemy. What do you
find in this to like so much?”
“It is a picture--a little bit of truth and beauty brought into the
limits of the eye’s understanding. It seems to satisfy
everything--one’s love of colour, one’s sense of form, and--yes, just
the little place in one’s emotions the two appeal to. It doesn’t
matter a bit about the subject. It is the scheme of colour which _is_
the subject, and the figures are only patterns in it.” She turned on
me. “O, you _are_ stupid, to go and paint those other things when you
can do like this!”
“Well, I can’t,” I said. “As a matter of fact it is by a friend of
mine. It is very good, as you say; but the critics would have none of
it.”
“The critics!” she snapped her rosy fingers disdainfully. “They are
just the flies on that glass, that have made it all dirty and obscure.
But the picture is behind all the time to speak for itself; and some
day posterity will clean away the dirt with a wet sponge, and the
truth will come out. I should like to know the man who painted it.”
“Sorry,” I said shortly. “He’s dead.”
Something in my tone seemed to strike her. Her eyes were on me, and
suddenly a strange light, like wistfulness or pity, came into them.
“I am sorry if I hurt you,” she said. “I did not know--how could I?
And I am sure, after seeing that dear little mother, you could paint
pictures like this if you would.”
“Would you like me to?” I said. I don’t know what made me say it. This
young callow criticism, refreshing as it might be, was hardly worth
the most transitory waiving of my principles. Yet oddly there came
into my mind the face, hectic and eager, of the boy Ronsin, whose
work, and gift to me, the picture had been--and I was jealous. Yes,
absurd as it may sound, because she had said she would like to know
him, I was jealous. For my art, or what else? Ah, that I cannot tell.
Yet at least I could not deny that, whatever the youthfulness of this
criticism, it had seen clearly here: the picture was, of its kind,
remarkably good.
“Of course I should,” she answered. “You admitted yourself, you know,
that it was a fine work.”
“It _is_ a fine work,” I said, “and I am not so dogmatic as to profess
that there is only one right theory of art in the world. But every fox
looks after his own skin, says the proverb; and dislikes, adds I, the
having it flayed from him to adorn a rival.”
And so ended our first disputation--which was by no means our last--on
the subject. If I was heckled and browbeaten, it was also agreeably
clear to me that I had got no fool for my housemate.
Fifine, come out of her shell of apathy, was a surprise indeed.