THE LOST MASTER
"What's become of Waring since he gave us all the slip?" was quoted
by a man at the Painters' Club the other night. What made him think
of Browning, he blandly explained to the two or three chaps sitting
at his table on the terrace, was not the terrific heat, but the line
swam across his memory when he recalled the name of Albertus Magnus
as a green meteor seen for a moment far out at sea drops into the
watery void. "Who, in the name of Apollo, is Albertus Magnus?" was
asked. The painter sat up. "There you are, you fellows!" he roared.
"You all paint or write or spoil marble, but for the history of your
art you don't care a rap." "Yes, but what has your Albertus
Thingamajig to do with Browning's Waring?" "Only this," was the
grumbling reply; "it is a similar case." "A story, a story!" we all
cried, and settled down for a yarn; but no yarn was spun. The
painter relapsed into silence, and the group gradually dissolved. We
sat still, hoping against hope.
"See here," we expostulated, "really you should not arouse
expectations, and then evade the logical conclusions. It's not
fair." "I didn't care to explain to those other fellows," was the
reply. "They are too cynical for my taste. They go to the holy of
holies of art to pray, and come away to scoff. Materialism, rather
realism, as you call it, is the canker of modern art. Suppose I told
you that here, now, in this noisy Tophet of New York, there lives
a man of genius, who paints like a belated painter of the
Renaissance? Suppose I said that I could show you his work, would
you think I was crazy?" He paused. "A young genius, poor, unknown?
Oh, lead us to him, Sir Painter, and we shall call you blest!" "He
is not young, and, while the great public and the little dealers
have not heard of him, he has a band of admirers, rich men leagued
in a conspiracy of silence, who buy his pictures, though they don't
show them to the critics." We reiterated our request: "Lead us to
him!" Without noticing our importunities, he continued: "He paints
for the sake of beautiful paint; he paints as did Hokusai, the
Old-Man-Mad-for-Painting, or like Frenhofer, the hero in Balzac's
story, The Unknown Masterpiece! He is more like Balzac's
Frenhofer--is that the chap's name?--than Browning's Waring. He is
the lost master, a Frenhofer who has conquered, for he has a hundred
masterpieces stored away in his studio." "Lost master?" we
stuttered; "a hundred masterpieces that have never been shown to
critic or public? Oh! 'Never star was lost here but it rose afar.'"
"Yes, and he quotes Browning by the yard, for he was a close friend
of the poet, and of his best critic, Nettleship, the animal painter,
now dead." "Won't you tell his story connectedly, and put us out of
our agony?" we pleaded. "No," he answered; "I'll do better. I'll
take you to his studio." The evening ended in a blaze of fireworks.
The afternoon following we found ourselves in Greenwich Village, in
front of a row of old-fashioned cottages covered with honeysuckle.
You may recall the avenue and this particular block that has thus
far resisted the temptation to become either lofty apartment or
business palace. But the painter met us here, and conducted us
westward until we reached a warehouse--gloomy, in need of repair,
yet solid, despite the teeth of time. We entered the wagonway,
traversed a dirty court, mounted a dark staircase, and paused before
a low door. "Do you knock," we were admonished, and at once did so.
Approaching footsteps. A rattling and grating of rusty bolts and
keys. The door was slowly opened. A big hairy head appeared. The
eyes set in this halo of white hair were positively the most
magnificent I had ever seen sparkle and glow in a human countenance.
If a lion were capable of being at once poet and prophet and exalted
animal, his eyes would have possessed something of the glance of
this stranger. We turned anxiously to to our friend. He had
disappeared. What a trick to play at such a moment. "Who do you
wish?" rumbled a mellow voice. "Albertus Magnus?" we timidly
inquired, expecting to be pitched down the stairs the next minute.
"Ah!" was the reply. Silence. Then, "Come in, please; don't stumble
over the canvases." We followed the old man, whose stature was not
as heroic as his head; and we did not fail to stumble, for the way
was obscure, and paved with empty frames, canvases, and a litter of
bottles, paint-tubes, easels, rugs, carpets, wretched furniture, and
all the other flotsam and jetsam of an old-style studio. We were not
sorry when we came into open space and light. We were in the room
that doubtless concealed the lost masterpieces, and there, blithely
smoking a cigarette, sat our guide, the painter. He had entered by
another door, he explained; and, without noticing our discontented
air, he introduced us to the man of the house. In sheer daylight he
looked younger, though his years must have bordered upon the
biblical threescore and ten. But the soul, the brain that came out
of his wonderful eyes, were as young as to-morrow.
"Isn't he a corker?" irreverently demanded our friend. "He is not
even as old as he looks. He doesn't eat vegetables, when thirsty he
drinks anything he can get, and smokes day and night. And yet he
calls himself an idealist." The old painter smiled. "I suppose I
have been described as Waring to you, because I knew Robert
Browning. I did vanish from the sight of my friends for years, but
only in the attempt to conquer paint, not to achieve money or
kingship, like the original Alfred Domett, called Waring in the
poem. But when I returned from Italy I was a stranger in a strange
land. No one remembered me. I had last seen Elihu Vedder at Capri.
Worst of all, I had forgotten that with time fashions change in art
as in dress, and nowadays no one understands me, and, with the
exception of Arthur Davies, I understand no one. I come from the
Venetians, Davies from the early Florentines; his line is as
beautiful as Pollajuolo. I love gold more than did Facino Cane of
Balzac. Gold, ah! luscious gold, the lost secret of the masters.
Tell me, do you love Titian?" We swore allegiance to the memory of
Titian. The artist seemed pleased. "You younger men are devoted to
Velasquez and Hals--too much so. Great as painters, possibly
greatest among painters, their souls never broke away from the soil
like runaway balloons. They miss height and depth. Their colour
never sings like Titian's. They surprise secrets in the eyes of
their sitters, but never the secret surprised by the Italian. I sat
at his feet, before his canvases, fifty years, and I'm further away
than ever--" Our friend interrupted this rhapsody.
"Look here, Albertus, you man with a name out of Thomas Aquinas,
don't you think you are playing on your visitors' nerves, just to
set them on edge with expectancy? I've heard this choral service for
the glorification of Titian more than once, and I've inevitably
noticed that you had a trump of your own up your sleeve. You love
Titian. Well, admit it. You don't paint like him, your colour scheme
is something else, and what you are after you only know yourself.
Come! trot out your Phantom Ship or The Cascade of Gold, or, better
still, that landscape with a river-bank and shepherds." The old man
gravely bowed. Then he manipulated the light, placed a big easel in
proper position, fumbled among the canvases that made the room
smaller, secured one and placed it before us. We drew a long breath.
"Richard Wagner, not Captain Maryatt, was the inspiration," murmured
the master.
The tormented vessel stormed down the picture, every inch of sail
bellying out in a wind that blew a gale infernal beneath the rays,
so it seemed to us, of a poisonous golden moon. The water was
massive and rhythmic. In the first plane a smaller ship does not
even attempt to tack. You anticipate the speedy crackling and
smashing when the Flying Dutchman rides over her; but it never
happens. Like the moonshine, the phantom ship may melt into
air-bubbles before it reaches the other boat. No figures are shown.
Nevertheless, as we studied the picture we fancied that we discerned
the restless soul of Vanderdecken pacing his quarter-deck, cursing
the elements, or longing for some far-away Senta. A poetic
composition handled with masterly evasiveness, the colour was the
strangest part of it. Where had Albertus caught the secret of that
flowing gold, potable gold; gold that threateningly blazed in the
storm wrack, gold as lyric as sunshine in spring! And why such
sinister gold in a moonlit sea? We suspected illusion. My friend,
the painter, laughed: "Aha! you are looking for the sun, and is it
only a moon overhead? Our conjurer here has a few tricks. Know then,
credulous one, that the moon yonder is really the sun. Seek the
reason for that suffused back sky, realise that the solar
photosphere in a mist is precisely the breeder of all this magic
gold you so envy." "Yes," we exclaimed, "but the motion of it all,
the grip! Only Turner--" We were interrupted by a friendly slap on
the back. "Now, you are talking sense," said our friend. "Turner, a
new Turner, who has heard the music of Wagner and read the magic
prose of Joseph Conrad." What followed we shall not pretend to
describe. Landscapes of old ivory and pearly greys; portraits, in
which varnish modulated with colours of a gamut of intensity that
set tingling the eyeballs, and played a series of tonal variations
in the thick of which the theme was lost, hinted at, emerged
triumphantly, and at the end vanished in the glorious arabesque;
then followed apocalyptic visions, in which the solid earth
staggered through the empyrean after a black sun--a magnetic disk
doomed by a mighty voice that cried aloud: "It is accomplished."
Pastorals as ravishing as Giorgione's, with nuances of gold
undreamed of since the yellow flecks in the robes of Rembrandt,
faced us. Our very souls centred in our eyes; but, uncritical as was
our mood in the presence of all this imaginative art, we could not
help noting that it was without a single trait of the modern. Both
in theme and treatment these pictures might have been painted at the
time of the Renaissance. The varnish was as wonderful as that on the
belly of a Stradivarius fiddle. The blues were of a celestial
quality to be found in Titian or Vermeer; the resonant browns, the
whites--ah! such exquisite whites, "plus blanche que la plus blanche
hermine"--the rich blacks, sonorous reds and yellows--what were all
these but secrets recovered from the old masters. The subjects were
mainly legendary or mythological; no discordant note of "modernity"
obtruded its ugly self. We were in the presence of something as rare
as a lyric by Shelley or the playing of Frederic Chopin.
What! Why! How! we felt like asking all at once, but Albertus Magnus
only smiled, and we choked our emotion. Why had he never exhibited
at the Academy or at a special show? Our friend saw our
embarrassment, and shielded us by blurting out: "No! he never
exhibited, this obstinate Albertus. He never will. He makes more
money than he needs, and will leave it to some cat asylum, for he is
a hardened bachelor. Women do not interest him. You won't find one
female head in all this amazing collection. Nor has the dear old
Diogenes suffered from a love-affair. His only love is his paint.
His one weakness is a selfish, a miserly desire to keep all this
beautiful paint for himself. Balzac would have delighted to analyse
such a peculiar mania. Degas is amiability itself compared with this
curmudgeon of genius. Now, don't stop me, Albertus--" "But I must,"
expostulated the painter. "I am always glad to receive visitors here
if they are not dealers or persons ignorant of art, or those who
think the moderns can paint. Yet no one comes to see me. My
chattering friend here occasionally asks them, and he is a hoaxer.
While I go nowhere--I haven't been east of Ninth Avenue for years.
What shall I do?" "Paint!" was the curt answer of our friend, as we
took our leave. In New York, now, a painter of genius who is known
to few! Extraordinary! Is his name really Albertus Magnus, or is
that only Latin for Albert Ryder? Our friend shrugged his shoulders
and smiled mysteriously. We hate tomfoolery. "Be frank!" we adjured
him. He hummed: "In Vishnu land what avatar?" "More Browning!" we
sneered.
Then we crossed over to the club and talked art far into the night.
Also wet our clay. And Albertus Magnus, will he never come from his
paint cave and reveal to the world his masterpieces? Perhaps. Who
knows? As the Russians say--_Avos!_