PERHAPS the reason Alere never took to colours was because of his
inherent and unswerving truthfulness of character. Genuine to a degree,
he could not make believe--could not deceive--could not masquerade in a
dress-coat.
Now, most of the landscape-painting in vogue to-day is nature in a
dress-coat.
In a whole saloon of water colours, in a whole Academy, or Grosvenor
Gallery you shall hardly find three works that represent any real scene
in the fields.
I have walked about the fields a good deal in my brief, fretful hour,
yet I have never seen anything resembling the strange apparitions that
are hung on these walls every spring. Apparitions--optical illusions,
lit up with watery, greenish, ghastly, ghost-light--nothing like them on
earth I swear, and I suspect not in Heaven or Hades.
Touched-up designs: a tree taken from one place, a brook from another, a
house from another--_and mixed to order_, like a prescription by the
chemist--xv. grs. grass, 3 dr. stile, iiij. grs. rustic bridge. Nature
never plants--nature is no gardener--no design, no proportion in the
fields.
Colours! Passing a gasworks perhaps you may have noticed that the
surface of the water in the ditch by the roadside bears a greenish scum,
a pale prismatic scum; this is the colour-box of modern landscape.
How horrible the fields would look if they wore such hues in reality as
are accepted on canvas at the galleries! Imagine these canvas tints
transferred to the sward, the woods, the hills, the streams, the sky!
_Dies iræ, dies illæ_--it would, indeed, be an awful day, the Last Day
of Doom, and we should need the curtain at Drury Lane drawn before our
eyes to shut it out of sight.
There are some who can go near to paint dogs and horses, but a meadow of
mowing grass, not one of them can paint that.
Many can _draw_ nature--drawings are infinitely superior generally to
the painting that follows; scarce one now paints real nature.
Alere could not squeeze his sketches into the dress-coat of sham colour
for any sacred exhibition wall whatever.
One thing Alere never attempted to draw--a bird in flight. He recognized
that it was impossible; his taste rejected every conventional attitude
that has been used for the purpose; the descending pigeon, the Japanese
skewered birds, the swallow skimming as heavily as a pillow. You cannot
draw a bird in flight. Swallows are attempted oftenest, and done worst
of all.
How can you draw life itself? What is life? you cannot even define it.
The swallow's wing has the motion of life--its tremble--its wonderful
delicacy of vibration--the instant change--the slip of the air;--no man
will ever be able to draw a flying swallow.
At the feet of this Gamaliel of Fleet Street, Amaryllis had sat much,
from time to time, when the carpet-bag was packed and Alere withdrew to
his Baden-Baden--_i.e._, to Coombe Oaks and apple-bloom, singing finch,
and wild-flowers.
There were no "properties" in Alere's room at his lodgings; no odd bits
collected during his wanderings to come in useful some day as make-up,
realistic rock work, as it were, in the picture. No gauntlets or
breast-plates, scraps of old iron; no Turkish guns or yataghans, no
stags' horns, china, or carvings to be copied some day into an
illustration. No "properties."
No studio effects. The plaster bust that strikes the key and tones the
visitors' mind to "Art," the etchings, the wall or panel decorations,
the sliding curtains, the easels in the corner, the great
portfolios--the well-known "effects" were absent.
A plain room, not even with a north light, plain old furniture, but not
very old--not ostensibly ancient, somewhere about 1790 say--and this
inherited and not purchased; Flamma cared not one atom for furniture,
itself, old or new; dusty books everywhere, under the table, on the
mantelpiece, beside the coal scuttle; heaps on chairs, quartos on the
sofa, crowds more in his bedroom, besides the two bookcases and drawers;
odd books most of them, Cornelius Agrippa, _Le Petit Albert_, French
illustrated works, editions of Faust, music, for Flamma was fond of his
many-keyed flute.
Great people once now and then called and asked to see Alere Flamma at
the business place in Fleet Street; people with titles, curiously out of
place, in the press-room, gold leaf on the floor, odour of printer's
ink, dull blows of machinery, rotten planking, partitions pasted over
with illustrations and stained with beer, the old place trembling as the
engine worked; Flamma, in his shirt-sleeves, talking to "His
Excellency."
Flamma's opinion, information he could give, things he knew; abroad they
thought much of him.
Presents came occasionally--a boar's head from Germany; fine Havana
cigars--Alere always had a supply of the best cigars and Turkish
tobacco, a perennial stream of tobacco ran for him; English venison;
once a curious dagger from Italy, the strangest present good-natured
Alere could possibly have received!
Sometimes there came a pressing invitation from a noble connoisseur to
his country seat; Flamma's views were wanted about the re-arrangement of
the library, the re-binding of some treasure picked up in a cover all
too poor for its value, the building of another wing, for the artist is
the true architect, as the princes of Italy knew of old time. Till the
artist is called in we shall never again see real architecture in the
world. Did not Benvenuto design fortifications? Did not Michael Angelo
build St. Peter's at Rome?
If my lord duke wants a palace he cannot have it till he calls in the
artist, the Alere Flamma, to draw it for him; if my lord bishop needs a
cathedral he cannot have it till he calls in the poet-draughtsman, till
he goes to Alere Flamma.
Our so-called architects are mere surveyors, engineers, educated
bricklayers, men of hard straight ruler and square, mathematically
accurate, and utterly devoid of feeling.
The princes of Italy knew better--they called in the poet and the
painter, the dreamers to dream for them.
You call in your "practical" architect, and he builds you a brick box;
not for a hundred thousand pounds in fees could he build you a palace or
a cathedral.
The most ignorant of men are the "practical" people. It is meet and
fitting that they should be worshipped and set on high. The calf
worshipped of old was at least golden, and these are of lead.
But Alere could not go; he would do anything he was asked in this way;
he would take infinite pains to please, but he could not leave Fleet
Street for any mansion.
When a man once gets into Fleet Street he cannot get out.
Conventionally, I suppose, it would be the right thing to represent
Alere as a great genius neglected, or as a genius destroyed by
intemperance. The conventional type is so easy--so accepted--so popular;
it would pay better, perhaps, to make him out a victim in some way.
He was not neglected, neither was he the victim of intemperance in the
usual sense.
The way to fame and fortune had always been wide open to him; there were
long intervals when he did not drink, nor did drink enfeeble his touch;
it was not half so much to struggle against as the chest diseases from
which professional men so often suffer; I believe if he had really tried
or wished he could have conquered his vice altogether. Neither of these
causes kept him from the foremost rank.
There was no ambition, and there was no business-avarice. So many who
have no ideal are kept hard at work by the sheer desire of money, and
thus spurred onward, achieve something approaching greatness. Alere did
not care for money.
He could not get out of Fleet Street. Ten pounds was a large sum in the
company he frequented; he did not want any more.
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