died last year at the age of twenty-four, spent a week with me at
Bognor, trying to get better, a little while before it was quite
certainly too late; and we had long talks of a very intimate kind as we
lay and lounged about the sand from Selsey to Blake's Felpham, along
that exquisite coast. To him, if he were to be believed, all that meant
very little; he hated nature, he was always assuring you; but at Bognor
nature deals with its material so much in the manner of art that he can
hardly have been sincere in not feeling the colour-sense of those
arrangements of sand, water, and sky which were perpetually changing
before him. One of our conversations that I remembered best, because he
seemed to put more of himself into it than usual, took place one
afternoon in June as we lay on the sand about half-way towards Selsey,
beyond the last of those troublesome groins, and I remember that as I
listened to him, and heard him defining so sincerely his own ideas of
art, I was conscious all the time of a magnificent silent refutation of
some of those ideas, as nature, quietly expressing herself before us,
transformed the whole earth gradually into a new and luminous world of
air. He did not seem to see the sunset; now and then he would pick up a
pebble and throw it vehemently, almost angrily, into the water. We were
talking of art. He began to explain to me what art meant to him, and
what it was he wanted to do with his own art. I remember almost the very
words he used, sometimes so serious, sometimes so petulant and boyish. I
was interested in his ideas, and the man too interested me; so young and
so experienced, so mature already and so enthusiastic under his
cynicism. He puzzled me: it was as if there were a clue wanting; I could
not get further with him than a certain point, frank, self-explanatory
even, as he seemed to be. Of himself he never spoke, only of his ideas.
I knew vaguely that he had been in Paris, and I supposed that he had
been living there for some time. I had met him in London, in the street,
quite casually, and he had looked so ill that I had asked him there and
then to come with me to Bognor, where I was going. He agreed willingly,
and was at the station with his bag the next day. I never ask people
about their private affairs, and his talk was entirely about pictures,
his own chiefly, and about ideas. As he talked I tried to piece together
the man and his words. What was it in this man, who was so much a
gentleman, that drew him instinctively, whenever he took up a brush or a
pencil, towards gross things, things that he painted as if he hated
them, but painted always? Was it a theory or an enslavement? and had he,
in order to interpret with so cruel a fidelity so much that was
factitious and dishonourable in life, sunk to the level of what he
painted? I could not tell. He was not obviously the man of his pictures,
nor was he obviously the reverse. I felt in those pictures, and I felt
equally, but differently, in the man, a fundamental sincerity; after
that came I know not how much of pose, perhaps merely the defiant pose
of youth. He was a problem to me, which I wanted to think out; and I
listened very attentively to everything that he said on that afternoon
when he was so much more communicative than usual.
'All art, of course,' he said, 'is a way of seeing, and I have my way. I
did not get to it at once. Like everybody else, I began by seeing too
much. Gradually I gave up seeing things in shades, in subdivisions; I
saw them in masses, each single. It takes more choice than you think,
and more technical skill, to set one plain colour against another,
unshaded, like a great, raw morsel, or a solid lump of the earth. The
art of the painter, you observe, consists in seeing in a new,
summarising way, getting rid of everything but the essentials; in seeing
by patterns. You know how a child draws a house? Well, that is how the
average man thinks he sees it, even at a distance. You have to train
your eye not to see. Whistler sees nothing but the fine shades, which
unite into a picture in an almost bodiless way, as Verlaine writes songs
almost literally "without words." You can see, if you like, in just the
opposite way: leaving in only the hard outlines, leaving out everything
that lies between. To me that is the best way of summarising, the most
abbreviated way. You get rid of all that molle, sticky way of work which
squashes pictures into cakes and puddings, and of that stringy way of
work which draws them out into tapes and ribbons. It is a way of seeing
square, and painting like hits from the shoulder.
'I wonder,' he went on, after a moment, 'how many people think that I
paint ugly pictures, as they call them, because I am unable to paint
pretty ones? Perhaps even you have never seen any of my quite early
work: Madonnas for Christmas cards and hallelujah angels for
stained-glass windows. They were the prettiest things imaginable,
immensely popular, and they brought me in several pounds. I take them
out and show them to people who complain that I have no sense of
beauty, and they always ask me pityingly why I have not gone on turning
out these confectionaries.'
'I contend that I have never done anything which is without beauty,
because I have never done anything which is without life, and life is
the source and sap of beauty. I tell you that there is not one of those
grimacing masks, those horribly pale or horribly red faces, plastered
white or red, leering professionally across a gulf of footlights, or a
cafe-table, that does not live, live to the roots of the eyes, somewhere
in the soul, I think! And if beauty is not the visible spirit of all
that infamous flesh, when I have sabred it like that along my canvas,
with all my hatred and all my admiration of its foolish energy, I at
least am unable to conjecture where beauty has gone to live in the
world.'
He looked at me almost indignantly, as if he took me for one of his
critics. I said nothing, and he went on:
'I have done nothing, believe me, without being sure that I was doing a
beautiful thing. People don't see it, it seems. How should they, when
we do our best to train them up within the prison walls of a Raphael
aesthetics, when we send them to the Apollo Belvedere, instead of to the
marbles of AEgina? Our academies shut out nine parts of beauty and
imprison us with the poor tenth, which we have never even the space to
frequent casually and grow familiar with. How much of the world itself
do you think exists as a thing of beauty for the average man? Why, he
has to know if the most exquisite leaf in the world, the thing I came
upon just now in the lane, belongs to a flower or a weed before he can
tell whether he ought to commend it for existing. I hate nature, because
fools prostrate themselves before sunsets; as if there is not much
better drawing in that leaf than in all the Turners of the sky. You see,
one has to quote Turner to apologise for a sunset!'
He laughed, really without malice, waving his hand towards the sky with
a youthful impertinence. For a little while he was silent, and then, in
a different tone, he said:
'I wonder if it is possible to paint what one doesn't like, to take
one's models as models, and only know them for the hours during which
they sit to you in this attitude or that. I don't believe that it is.
Much of our bad painting comes from respectable people thinking that
they can soil their hands with paint and not let the dye sink into their
innermost selves. Do you know that you are the only man of my own world
that I ever see, or have seen for years now? People call me eccentric; I
am only logical. You can't paint the things I paint, and live in a
Hampstead villa. You must come and see me some day: will you take the
address? 3 Somervell Street, Islington. It's not much like a studio.
However, there's "Collins's" at hand, and I live there a good deal, you
know. I lived in the Hampstead Road for some time on account of the
"Bedford." But "Collins's" suits me and my models better.'
He broke off with an ambiguous laugh, flung his last stone into the
water, and jumped up, as if to end the conversation. Something in the
way he spoke made me feel vaguely uneasy, but I was used to his
exaggerations, his way of inventing as he went along. Was I, after all,
any nearer to his secret, to himself as he really was?
Waydelin went back to London and I to Russia, which I shall always
remember, after that terrible summer under the gold and green domes of
Moscow, as the hottest country in which I have ever been. When I came
back to London I thought of Waydelin, made plan after plan to visit him,
when one evening in November I received a brief note in his handwriting,
asking me if I would come and see him at once, as he was very ill, and
wanted to see me on a matter of business. I started immediately after
dinner and got to Islington a little after nine. The street was one of
those drab, hopeless streets to which a Russian observer has lately
attributed the 'spleen' from which all Englishmen are thought to suffer.
There was a row of houses on each side of the way, every house exactly
like every other house, each with its three steps leading to the door,
its bow window on one side, its strip of dingy earth in which there were
a few dusty stalks between the lowest step and the railing, the paint
for the most part peeling off the door, the bell-handle generally
hanging out from its hole in the wall. I rang at No. 3. I had to wait
for some time, and then the door was opened by an impudent-looking
servant girl in a very untidy dress. I asked for Waydelin. 'Mrs.
Waydelin, did you say?' said the girl, leering at me; then, calling over
my head to the driver of a four-wheeler which just then drew up at the
door, 'Wait five minutes, will you?' she turned to me again: 'Mr.
Waydelin? I don't know if you can see him.' I told her impatiently that
I had come by appointment, and she held the door open for me to come in.
She knocked at a room on the first floor. 'Come in,' said a shrill voice
that I did not know, and I went in.
It was a bedroom; a woman, with her bodice off, was making-up in front
of the glass, and in a corner, with the clothes drawn up to his chin, a
man lay in bed. The cheeks were covered by a three days' beard; they
were ridged into deep hollows; large eyes, very wide open, looked out
under a mass of uncombed hair, and as the face turned round on the
pillow and looked at me without any change of expression I recognised
Peter Waydelin. The woman, seeing me in the glass, nodded at my
reflection, and said, as she drew a black pencil through her eyelashes:
'You'll excuse me, won't you? I have to be at the hall in ten minutes.
Don't stand on ceremony; there's Peter. He'll be glad to see you, poor
dear!' She spoke in a common and affected voice, and I thought her a
deplorable person, with her carefully curled yellow hair, her rouged and
powdered cheeks, her mouth glistening with lip salve, her big, empty
blue eyes with their blackened under-lids, her fat arms and shoulders,
the tawdry finery of her costume, half on and half off the body. I moved
towards the bed, and Waydelin looked up at me with a queer, mournful
smile.
'It was good of you to come,' he said, stretching out a long, thin hand
to me; 'Clara has to go out, and we can have a talk. How do you like the
last thing I've done?'
I lifted the drawing which was lying on the bed. It was a portrait of
the woman before the glass, just as she looked now, one of the most
powerful of his drawings, crueller even than usual in its insistence on
the brutality of facts: the crude contrasts of bone and fat, the vulgar
jaw, the brassy eyes, the reckless, conscious attitude. Every line
seemed to have been drawn with hatred. I looked at Mrs. Waydelin. She
had finished dressing, and she came up to the bedside to say good-bye to
Peter. 'Horrid thing,' she said, nodding her head at the drawing; 'not a
bit like me, is it? I assure you none of them like it at the hall. They
say it doesn't do me justice. I'm sure I hope not.' I bowed and murmured
something. 'Good-bye, Peter,' she said, smiling down at him in a kindly,
hurried way, 'I'll come back as soon as I can,' and with a nod to me she
was out of the room.
Peter drew himself slowly up in the bed, pointed to a shawl, which I
wrapped round his shoulders, and then, looking at me a little defiantly,
said: 'My theory, do you remember? of living the life of my models! She
is a very nice woman and an excellent model, and they appreciate her
very much at "Collins's"; but it appears that I have no gift for
domesticity.'
I scarcely knew what to say. While I hesitated he went on: 'Don't
suppose I have any illusions, or, indeed, ever had. I married that woman
because I couldn't help doing it, but I knew what I was doing all the
time. Have you ever been in Belgium? There is stuff they give you there
to drink called Advokat, which you begin by hating, but after a time you
can't get on without it. She is like Advokat.'
'You are ill, Waydelin,' I said, 'and you speak bitterly. I don't like
to hear you speak like that about your wife.'
Waydelin stared at me curiously. 'So you are going to defend her against
my brutality,' he said. 'I will give you every opportunity. Did you know
I was married?'
I shook my head.
'I have been married three years,' he said, 'and I never told even you.
I know you did not take me at my word when I talked about how one had to
live in order to paint as I painted, but I did not tell you half. I
have been living, if you like to call it so, systematically, not as a
stranger in a foreign country which he stares at over his Baedeker, but
as like a native as I could, and with no return ticket in my pocket. Why
shouldn't one be as thorough in one's life as in one's drawing? Is it
possible for one to be otherwise, if one is really in earnest in either?
And the odd thing is, as you will say, I didn't live in that way because
I wanted to do it for my art, but something deeper than my art, a
profound, low instinct, drew me to these people, to this life, without
my own will having anything to do with it. My work has been much more
sincere than any one suspected. It used to amuse me when the papers
classed me with the Decadents of a moment, and said that I was probably
living in a suburban villa, with a creeper on the front wall. I have
never cared for anything but London, or in London for anything but here,
or the Hampstead Road, or about the Docks. I never really chose the
music-halls or the public-houses; they chose me. I made the music-halls
my clubs; I lived in them, for the mere delight of the thing; I liked
the glitter, false, barbarous, intoxicating, the violent animality of
the whole spectacle, with its imbecile words, faces, gestures, the very
heat and odour, like some concentrated odour of the human crowd, the
irritant music, the audience! I went there, as I went to public-houses,
as I walked about the streets at night, as I kept company with
vagabonds, because there was a craving in me that I could not quiet. I
fitted in theories with my facts; and that is how I came to paint my
pictures.'
As he spoke, with bitter ardour, I looked at him as if I were seeing him
for the first time. The room, the woman, that angry drawing on the bed,
and the dishevelled man dying there, just at the moment when he had
learnt everything that such experiences could teach him, fell of a
sudden into a revealing relation with each other. I did not know whether
to feel that the man had been heroic or a fool; there had been, it was
clear to me, some obscure martyrdom going on, not the less for art's
sake because it came out of the mere necessity of things. A great pity
came over me, and all I could say was, 'But, my dear friend, you have
been very unhappy!'
'I never wanted to be happy,' said Waydelin; 'I wanted to live my own
life and do my own work; and if I die to-morrow (as likely enough I
may), I shall have done both things. My work satisfies me, and, because
of that, so does my life.'
'Are you very ill?' I asked.
'Dead, relatively speaking,' he said in his jaunty way, which death
itself could not check in him; 'I'm only waiting on some celestial order
of precedence in these matters, which, I confess, I don't understand. So
it was good of you to come; I would like to arrange with you about what
is to be done with my work, presently, when they will have to accept me.
I always said that I had only to die in order to be appreciated.'
I had a long talk with him, and I promised to carry out his wishes. All
the money that his pictures brought in was to go to his wife, but, as he
said, she would not know what to do with them if they were left in her
own hands, not even how to turn them into money. He was quite certain
that they would sell; he knew exactly the value of what he had done, and
he knew how and when work finds its own level.
I sat beside the bed, talking, for more than two hours. He could no
longer do much work, he said, and he hated being alone when he was not
working. But it amused him to talk, for a change. 'Clara talks when she
is here,' he said, with one of his queer smiles. I promised to come back
and see him again. 'Come soon,' he said, 'if you want to be sure of
finding me.'
I went back two days afterwards, a little later in the evening so that I
need not meet Mrs. Waydelin, and he seemed better. He had shaved, his
hair was brushed and combed, and he was sitting up in bed, with the
shawl thrown lightly about his shoulders.
'Would you like to know,' he began, almost at once, 'how I came to paint
in what we will call, if you please, my final manner? One day, at the
theatre, I saw Sada Yacco. She taught me art.'
'What do you mean?' I said.
'Look here,' he went on, 'they say everything has been done in art. But
no, there is at least one thing that remains for us. Have you ever seen
Sada Yacco? When I saw her for the first time I said to myself, "I have
found out the secret of Japanese art." I had never been able to
understand how it was that the Japanese, who can imitate natural things,
a bird, a flower, the rain, so perfectly, have chosen to give us,
instead of a woman's face, that blind oval, in which the eyes, nose, and
mouth seem to have been made to fit a pattern. When I saw Sada Yacco I
realised that the Japanese painters had followed nature as closely in
their woman's faces as in their birds and flowers, but that they had
studied them from the women of the Green Houses, the women who make up,
and that Japanese women, made up for the stage or for the factitious
life of the Green Houses, look exactly like these elegant, unnatural
images of the painters. What a new kind of reality that opened up to me,
as if a window had suddenly opened in a wall! Here, I said to myself, is
something that the painters of Europe have never done; it remains for
me to do it. I will study nature under the paint by which woman, after
all, makes herself more woman; the ensign of her trade, her flag as the
enemy. I will get at the nature of this artificial thing, at the skin
underneath it, and the soul under the skin. Watteau and the Court
painters have given us the dainty, exterior charm of the masquerade,
woman when she plays at being woman, among "lyres and flutes." Degas, of
course, has done something of what I want to do, but only a part, and
with other elements in his pure design, the drawing of Ingres, setting
itself new tasks, exercising its technique upon shapeless bodies in
tubs, and the strained muscles of the dancer's leg as she does
"side-practice." What I am going to do is to take all the ugliness,
gross artifice, crafty mechanism, of sex disguising itself for its own
ends: that new nature which vice and custom make out of the honest
curves and colours of natural things.
'Well, I have tried to do that; in all my best work, my work of the last
two or three years, I have done it. I am sure that what I have done is
a new thing, and I think it is the one new thing left to us Western
painters.'
'I am beginning to understand you,' I said, 'and I have not always found
it easy. When I admire you, it has so often seemed to me irrational. I
am gradually finding out your logic. Do you remember those talks we used
to have at Bognor, one in particular, when you told me about your way of
seeing?'
'Yes, yes,' he said, 'I remember, but there was one thing I am almost
sure I did not tell you, and it is curious. I don't understand it
myself. Do you know what it is to be haunted by colours? There is
something like a temptation of the devil, to me, in the colour green. I
know it is the commonest colour in nature, it is a good, honest colour,
it is the grass, the trees, the leaves, very often the sea. But no, it
isn't like that that it comes to me. To me it is an aniline dye,
poisoning nature. I adore and hate it. I can never get away from it. If
I paint a group outside a cafe at Montmartre by gas-light or electric
light, I paint a green shadow on the faces, and I suppose the green
shadow isn't there; yet I paint it. Some tinge of green finds its way
invariably into my flesh-colour; I see something green in rouged cheeks,
in peroxide-of-hydrogen hair; green lays hold of this poor, unhappy
flesh that I paint, as if anticipating the colour-scheme of the grave. I
know it, and yet I can't help doing it; I can't explain to you how it is
that I at once see and don't see a thing; but so it is.
'And it grew upon me too like an obsession. I always wanted to keep my
eyes perfectly clear, so that I could make my own arrangements of things
for myself, deliberately; but this, in some unpleasant way, seemed
horribly like "nature taking the pen out of one's hand and writing," as
somebody once said about a poet. I would rather do all the writing
myself; the more so, as I have to translate as I go.'
He broke off suddenly, as if a wave of exhaustion had come over him. His
eyes, which had been very bright, had gone dull again, and he let his
head droop till the chin rested on his breast.
'I have tired you,' I said, 'you must not talk any more. Try to go to
sleep now, and I will come back another day.'
'To-morrow?' he said, looking at me sleepily.
I promised. When I went back the next day he was weaker, but he insisted
on sitting up and talking. He spoke of his wife, without affection and
without bitterness; he spoke of death, with so little apprehension, or
even curiosity, that I was startled. His art was still a much more
realisable thing to him.
'Do you believe in God, religion, and all that?' he said. 'To tell you
the honest truth, I have never been able to take a vital interest in
those or any other abstract matters: I am so well content with this
world, if it would only go on existing, and I don't in the least care
how it came into being, or what is going to happen to it after I have
moved on. I suppose one ought to feel some sort of reverence for
something, for an unknown power, at least, which has certainly worked to
good purpose. Well, I can't. I don't know what reverence is. If I were
quite healthy, I should be a pagan, and choose, well! Dionysus Zagreus,
a Bacchus who has been in hell, to worship after my fashion, in some
religious kind of "orgie on the mountains." That is how somebody
explains the origin of religion, or was it of religious hymns? I forget;
but, you see, having had this rickety sort of body to drag about with
me, I have never been able to follow any of my practical impulses of
that sort, and I have had to be no more than an unemployed atheist,
ready to gibe at the gods he doesn't understand.
'I am afraid even in art,' he went on, as if leaving unimportant things
for the one thing important, 'I don't find it easy to look up to
anybody, at least in a way that anybody can be imagined as liking. I
have never gone very much to the National Gallery, not because I don't
think Venetian and Florentine pictures quite splendid, painted when they
were, but because I can get nothing out of them that is any good for me,
now in this all but twentieth century. You won't expect me, of all
people, to prate about progress, but, all the same, it's no use going to
Botticelli for hints about modern painting. We have different things to
look at, and see them differently. A man must be of his time, else why
try to put his time on the canvas? There are people, of course, who
don't, if you call them painters: Watts, Burne-Jones, Moreau, that sort
of hermit-crab. But I am talking about painting life and making it live.
If it comes to making pictures for churches and curiosity shops!'
He spoke eagerly, but in a voice which grew more and more tired, and
with long pauses. I was going to try to get him to rest when the front
door opened noisily and I heard Mrs. Waydelin's voice in the hall. I
heard other voices, men's and women's, feet coming up the stairs. I
looked apprehensively at Waydelin. He showed no surprise. I heard a door
open on the landing; then, a moment after, it was shut, and Mrs.
Waydelin came into the bedroom, flushed and perspiring through the
paint, and ran up to the bed. 'I have brought a few friends in to
supper,' she said. 'They won't disturb you, you know, and I couldn't
very well get out of it.'
She would have entered into explanations, but Waydelin cut her short. 'I
have not the least objection,' he said. 'I must only ask you to
apologise to them for my absence. I am hardly entertaining at present.'
She stared at him, as if wondering what he meant; then she asked me if I
would join her at supper, and I declined; then went to the
dressing-table, took up a pot of vaseline and looked at her eyelashes in
the glass; then put it down again, came back to the bed, told Peter
Waydelin to cheer up, and bounced out of the room.
I could see that Waydelin was now very tired and in need of sleep. I got
up to go. The partition between the two rooms must have been very thin,
for I could hear a champagne-cork drawn, the shrill laughter of women,
men talking loudly, and chairs being moved about the floor. 'I don't
mind,' he said, seeing what I was thinking, 'so long as they don't sing.
But they won't begin to sing for two hours yet, and I can get some
sleep. Good-night. Perhaps I shall not see you again.'