|It was a very warm morning in the Via Colonna, for many weeks had
passed, and May was coming on: it was a warm morning, and Hiram was
plodding away drearily by himself at his heroic picture of the Capture
of Babylon, with a stalwart young Roman from the Campagna sitting for
his model of the Persian leader, when the door unexpectedly opened, and
a quiet-looking old gentleman entered suddenly, alone and unannounced.
This was one of Hiram's days of deepest despondency, and he was heartily
sorry for the untimely interruption. 'Mr. Churchill sent me to look
at your pictures.' the stranger said in explanation, in a very soft,
pleasant voice. 'He told me I might possibly see some things here that
were really worth the looking at.'
Poor Hiram sighed somewhat wearily. 'Churchill has too good an opinion
altogether of my little attempts,' he said in all sincerity.
'I'm afraid you'll find very little here that's worthy your attention.
May I venture to ask your name?'
'Never mind my name, sir,' the old gentleman said, with a blandness that
contrasted oddly with the rough wording of his brusque sentences. 'Never
you mind my name, I say,--what's that to you, pray? My name's not at all
in question. I've come to see your pictures.'
'Are you a dealer, perhaps?' Hiram suggested, with another sigh at his
own excessive frankness in depreciating what was after all his bread and
butter--and a great deal more to him. 'You want to buy possibly?
'No, I don't want to buy,' the old gentleman answered flatly, with a
certain mild and kindly fierceness. 'I don't want to buy certainly. I'm
not a dealer; I'm an art-critic.'
'Oh, indeed,' Hiram said politely. The qualification is not one usually
calculated to endear a visitor to a struggling young artist.
'And you, I should say by your accent, are an American. That's bad, to
begin with. What on earth induced you to leave that cursed country of
yours? Oh generation of vipers--don't misinterpret that much-mistaken
word generation; it means merely son or offspring--who has warned you to
flee from the wrath that is?'
Hiram smiled in spite of himself. 'Myself,' he said; 'my own inner
prompting only.'
'Ha, that's better; so you fled from it.
You escaped from the city of destruction. You saved yourself from
Sodom and Gomorrah. Well, well, having had the misfortune to be born
an American, what better thing could you possibly do? Creditable,
certainly, very creditable. And now, since you have come to Rome to
paint, pray what sort of wares have you got to show me?'
Hiram pointed gravely to the unfinished Capture of Babylon.
'It won't do,' the old gentleman said decisively, after surveying the
principal figures with a critical eye through his double eyeglass.
'Oh, no, it won't do at all. It's painted--I admit that; it's painted,
solidly painted, which is always something nowadays, when coxcombs go
splashing their brushes loosely about a yard or two of blank canvas, and
then positively calling it a picture. It's painted, there's no denying
it. Still, my dear sir, you'll excuse my saying so, but there's really
nothing in it--absolutely nothing. What does it amount to, after all?
A line farrago of tweedledum and tweedledee, in Assyrian armour and
Oriental costume, and other unnatural, incongruous upholsterings, with a
few Roman models stuck inside it all, to do duty instead of lay figures.
Do you really mean to tell me, now, you think _that_ was what the
capture of Babylon actually looked like? Why, my dear sir, speaking
quite candidly, I assure you, for my own part I much prefer the Assyrian
bas-reliefs.'
Hiram's heart sank horribly within him. He knew it, he knew it; it was
all an error, a gigantic error. He had mistaken a taste for painting for
a genius for painting. He would never, never, never make a painter; of
that he was now absolutely certain. He could have sat down that moment
with his face between his hands and cried bitterly, even as he had done
years before when the deacon left him in the peppermint lot, but for the
constraining presence of that mild-mannered ferocious oddly-compounded
old gentleman.
'Is this any better?' he asked humbly, pointing with his brush-handle to
the Second Triumvirate.
'No sir, it is _not_ any better,' the relentless critic answered as
fiercely yet as blandly as ever. 'In fact, if it comes to that, it's a
great deal worse. Look at it fairly in the face and ask yourself what it
all comes to. It's a group of three amiable sugar-brokers in masquerade
costume discussing the current price-lists, and it isn't even painted,
though it's by way of being finished, I suppose, as people paint
nowadays. Is _that_ drawing, for example,' and he stuck his forefinger
upon young Cæsar's foreshortened foot, 'or that, or that, or that, or
that, sir? Oh, no, no; dear me, no. This is nothing like either drawing
or colouring. The figure, my dear sir--you'll excuse my saying so, but
you haven't the most rudimentary conception even of drawing or painting
the human figure.'
Hiram coincided so heartily at that moment in this vigorous expression
of adverse opinion, that but for Gwen he could have pulled out his
pocket-knife on the spot and made a brief end of a life long failure.
But the stranger only went coolly through the studio piece by piece,
passing the same discouraging criticisms upon everything he saw, and
after he had finally reduced poor Hiram to the last abyss of unutterable
despair, he said pleasantly in his soft, almost womanly voice, 'Well,
well, these are all sad trash, sad trash certainly. Not worth coming
from America to Rome to paint, you must admit; certainly not. Who on
earth was blockhead enough to tell you that you could ever possibly
paint the figure? I don't understand this. Churchill's an artist;
Churchill's a sculptor; Churchill knows what a human body's like, he's
no fool, I know. What the deuce did he send me here for, I wonder? How
on earth could he ever have imagined that those stuffed Guy Fawkeses
and wooden marionettes and dancing fantoccini were real living men and
women? Preposterous, preposterous. Stay. Let me think. Churchill
said something or other about your trying landscape. Have you got any
landscapes, young man, got any landscapes?'
'I've a few back here,' Hiram answered timidly, 'but I'm afraid they're
hardly worth your serious consideration. They were mostly done before
I left America, with very little teaching, or else on holidays here in
Europe, in the Tyrol chiefly, without much advice or assistance from
competent masters.'
'Bring them out!' the old gentleman said in a tone of command. 'Produce
your landscapes. Let's see what this place America is like, this desert
of newfangled towns without, any castles.'
Hiram obeyed, and brought out the poor little landscapes, sticking them
one after another on the easel in the light. There were the Thousand
Island sketches, and the New York lakes, and the White Mountains, and a
few pine-clad glens and dingles among the Tyrolese uplands and the lower
Engadine. The stranger surveyed them all attentively through his
double eyeglass with a stony critical stare, but still said absolutely
nothing. Hiram stood by in breathless expectation. Perhaps the
landscapes might fare better at this mysterious person's unsparing hands
than the figure pieces. But no: when he had finished, the stranger only
said calmly, 'Is that all?'
'All, all,' Hiram murmured in blank despair. 'The work of my lifetime.'
The stranger looked at him steadily.
'Young man,' he said with the voice and manner of a Hebrew prophet,
'believe me, you ought never to have come away from your native
America.'
'I know it, I know it,' Hiram cried, in the profoundest depth of
self-abasement.
'No, you ought never to have come away from America. As I wrote years
ago in the Seven Domes of Florence----'
'What!' Hiram exclaimed, horror-stricken.
'The Seven Domes of Florence! Then--then--then you are Mr. Truman?'
'Yes,' the stranger went on unmoved, without heeding his startled
condition. 'My name is John Truman, and, as I wrote years ago in the
Seven Domes of Florence----'
Hiram never heard the end of his visitor's long sonorous quotation from
his former self (in five volumes), for he sank back unmanned into an
easy-chair, and fairly moaned aloud in the exceeding bitterness of his
disappointment.
John Truman! It was he, then, the great art-critic of the age; the man
whose merest word, whose slightest breath could make or mar a struggling
reputation; the detector of fashionable shams, the promoter of honest
artistic workmanship--it was he that had pronounced poor Hiram's whole
life a miserable failure, and had remitted him remorselessly once more
to the corn and potatoes of Geauga County. The tears filled Hiram's eyes
as he showed the great man slowly and regretfully out of his studio; and
when that benevolent beaming face had disappeared incongruously with the
parting Parthian shot, 'Go back to your woods and forests, sir; go back
immediately to your woods and forests,' Hiram quite forgot the very
presence of the decked-out Persian commander, and burst into hot tears
such as he had not shed before since he ran away to nurse his boyish
sorrows alone by himself in the old familiar blackberry bottom.
How very differently he might have felt if only he could have followed
that stooping figure down the Via Colonna and heard the bland old
gentleman muttering audibly to himself, 'Oh, dear no, the young
barbarian ought never to have come away from his native America. No
castles--certainly not, but there's nature there clearly, a great deal
of nature; and he knows how to paint it too, he knows how to paint
it. Great purity of colouring in his Tyrolese sketches; breadth and
brilliancy very unusual in so young an artist; capital robust drawing; a
certain glassy liquid touch that I like about it all, too, especially
in the water. Who on earth ever told him to go and paint those
incomprehensible Assyrian monstrosities? Ridiculous, quite ridiculous.
He ought to have concentrated himself on his own congenial lakes and
woodlands. He has caught the exact spirit of them--weird, mysterious,
solemn, primitive, unvulgarised, antidemotic, titanic, infinite. The
draughtsmanship of the stratification in the rocks is quite superb in
its originality. Oh, dear no, he ought never to have come away at all
from his native natural America.