A YOUNG ARTIST'S EXPERIENCE.
Rose respected Hester Jennings. She could not help respecting her--a
creature so much in earnest, so indefatigably industrious, so
indifferent to all the distractions of the outer world which might have
taken her out of herself and away from her work, while she was not above
three or four years Rose's senior. If Hester would have let her, the
respect would have deepened to reverence, when Rose discovered what the
elder girl neither hid nor boasted of, that she was not only paying for
her art lessons at the art school, and in other respects freeing her
mother from the burden of her maintenance,--she was steadily earning a
small independent income by working incessantly at every spare moment
snatched from her studies. She worked at all sorts of designs for the
most insignificant and obscure cheaply illustrated books and periodicals
which cannot exist entirely on old plates excavated from forgotten
stores, bought by the thousand at trade sales, procured by transfer
from America, or even--now that national costumes are dying out--from
France and Germany. These attempts at art were intended to pass into the
hands of children--not the favoured children reared on the charming
fancies of Caldecott and Kate Greenaway; but homelier, more stolid, and
easily satisfied children. Such art was also for the masses of the
people who cannot pay for original art, save in its first uncertain
developments, when the stagier it is, the blacker, the bolder, the more
meretriciously pretty or fantastically horrible, the better it is
relished by its public. Even the stereotyped representations of the
coarser fashion-plates, and the eccentric symbols and arbitrary groups
employed in the humbler trade advertisements which the magnates in such
advertising have left far behind, were food for Hester's unresting
pencil. She might have injured herself irreparably by such illegitimate
practice had she not studied as faithfully as she designed, with
something of a stern, merciless severity, hunting out and correcting in
her studies the errors of her crude work.
Stress of circumstances had lent what the French would have called a
brutal side to Hester's natural candour and sincerity. It was one
comfort that she was still more brutal to herself than to the rest of
the world.
When Rose Millar showed her sister-artist some of Rose's sketches,
Hester gave them a glance and a toss aside one after the other.
"There is nothing in that," she said coolly, "though I can see you have
taken some trouble with it. This is not so bad. No, don't show that
thing to anybody else--it will do you harm." Her highest praise was the
"not bad" of mildest negative approval. "When you go to the class
to-morrow morning," predicted the slashing critic, "you may depend upon
it you will be turned back to a course of free-hand, or to copying from
the round again. I don't mean that Mr. St. Foy will be as plain-spoken
as I have been; he is a great deal too much afraid of hurting your
feelings and his own, and of losing a pupil, though he is not what I
should call either a bad man or a bad teacher. He is just like the rest;
but wait and see if he does not politely turn you back to very nearly
the beginning."
"I have had good teachers before," said Rose, crumpling up her nose and
her forehead tightly, and swelling a little with wounded self-respect as
well as wounded vanity. "It is queer, to say the least, if all my
teachers were in a conspiracy to push me on to what I was not fit for,
and to give me work altogether beyond my powers."
"You asked my opinion," said Hester Jennings, with inflexible calmness,
"and I am not surprised that you do not like it when you have got
it--few people do. The truth is not generally palatable. Not that I go
in for infallibility of judgment. Wait and see what Mr. St. Foy
does--not says--to-morrow."
"But why were the others--one of them an exhibitor at the Academy and
the Grosvenor--so much mistaken?" inquired Rose, with natural
indignation.
"How can I tell? But I hope you do not imagine that exhibitors are
necessarily geniuses, or not as other men, or that they must be able to
do a little bit of tolerable teaching when it pays them to condescend to
it? Mr. St. Foy never exhibits--very likely for the good reason that his
pictures are not accepted; but it does not follow on that account that
he cannot paint a fairly good picture--better even than some which are
hung on the line--and teach very tolerably to boot."
This was a new, bewildering doctrine, and a thoroughly disheartening
state of matters, to which Rose, extinguished as she was on her own
merits, did not make any reply.
"What I think, if you care to hear further what I think," said Hester,
with a dry smile, "is that in not taking time and in being wild to paint
a complete picture--something which everybody could recognize as a
picture, and your friends admire--as if such a thing can be done to any
good purpose for years and years--you have fallen into the disastrous
habit of forgetting, or of only half remembering, what you learnt
before, as you went on learning more. At least, that is the only way in
which I can account for the wretchedness of some of your drawing, and
the badness of your perspective, when you have got so far as to have a
feeling for a scale of colour and the tone of a picture."
"Well, I suppose I can learn it all over again," said Rose, with a
mixture of spirit and doggedness, forcing herself not to betray further
resentment, and to swallow a little girlish weakness at the
uncompromising treatment she was receiving. What would May and Dora say?
But she durst not trust herself to think of them.
"Of course," answered Hester, opening widely a pair of singularly clear
keen eyes. "Do you think I should have taken the trouble to say as much
if I had thought otherwise?"
It was the one dubious compliment which Rose extracted, without meaning
it, from the fault-finder.
Hester's openly expressed desire was to be an artist out and out, to
live like an artist, not to be troubled with the hindrances and petty
restrictions of an ordinary woman's life, which she was tempted to
despise, to which, if she yielded at all in her mother's house, it was
with scarcely concealed reluctance and aversion. Very likely she had
only the most one-sided conception of the life she would have chosen.
Certainly her notions of Bohemianism were about as ingenuous as "little
May's" might have been; to go where art called her, to do what art
demanded of her, to be art's humble, diligent, faithful servant all her
days, without being held back and fettered on every hand by set meals,
obtrusive servants, changes of dress, the obligation to pay and receive
visits. The dream of her life was to get to Paris and have lessons in
one of the French studios, where she was led to believe women have as
good a chance of being well taught as men possess. She would prefer to
live with some young women students like herself _en fille_--a
modified--much modified version of _en garçon_. They would hire an
_étage_ in some cheap, convenient quarter, get the wife or daughter of
the _conciergerie_ to prepare breakfast and supper for them, dine at one
of Duval's restaurants work all day, and sleep the sleep of the
labouring woman at night. She said she knew quite well how such artists
were considered in Paris, that they were regarded as _vauriennes_, to
whom there was no occasion to pay the respect and consideration which
were reserved for the potent _mesdames_ and the _jeunes filles ingénues_
of society. But what had she to do with society? She belonged to the
great republic of art, and had infinitely more to occupy her than to
listen for what society would say. As to not being able to take care of
herself and behave so that the slightest indignity to her would never be
ventured upon, the bare mention of such a possibility was received by
Hester with a wrath which bordered on fierceness, and for the most part
silenced her opponents effectually. Any displeasure which Annie Millar
had displayed on a similar supposition was mild by comparison.
Hester was not an only child. Mrs. Jennings had sons, all in the army or
navy, the mother was proud to say; but none of them in those days of
competitive examinations and expensive living was high enough up in the
service to be able to help his mother. On the contrary, grown men, with
men's callings, as they were, they found themselves under the necessity
of taking help from her. There were also other daughters besides Hester
married to men in professions as unexceptionable as those of their
brothers-in-law, but neither were they in circumstances which could make
them feel justified in granting the smallest subsidy to Mrs. Jennings.
Only Hester toiled for her mother at every moment which she could take
from her studies and her natural rest. Yet the two women, who had dwelt
under the same roof since Hester's babyhood, who were united by the
strongest and most sacred tie, were without one taste in common, were
irreconcilably different in every mode of thought and impulse of
feeling, were only alike in each being well-intentioned and desirous of
fulfilling her intuitions and justifying her beliefs. Being wise, the
pair agreed to differ. But oh! the pity of it where aims, ideals and
standards, hopes and fears, were all equally wide apart.
Mrs. Jennings did not interfere with Hester's freedom farther than she
could help. Hester had her own engagements, her own circle of friends.
It may not surprise those who are acquainted with the various versions
of Hester Jennings to be met with in this generation, that she was a
red-hot radical in contrast to her mother's conservatism--well-nigh a
_communiste_, to whom woman's rights and wrongs meant a burning question
of the day, which, next to her love of art, came very near to her heart.
She was almost powerless to assist her sister women, so overworked was
she on her own account, but whenever she could snatch a moment half a
dozen clubs and societies claimed her for their own. She had really a
wide personal knowledge of the working-women of London, employed and
unemployed.