Very soon Grainger’s grew half boastful, half jealous of its American prodigy, whom all later arrivals, catching up the nickname without the history of its origin, imagined to be likewise abnormal in the number of his toes. Some recalled Byron’s clubfoot, and wondered if Matt Strang’s pedal defect had any connection with the genius of “Four-toes, R.A.”
Inthe heated discussions at Grainger’s of the demerits of the painters of the day, no one ever mentioned the name of Strang except once; and then the Christian name was not Matthew. Matt did not like to bring up the name himself, asit was his own, but he soon understood that artists do not deal in other people’s pictures, and, recalling Madame Strang’s remark about her husband, he gradually came to the conviction that his namesake was the dethroned god of an earlier day, discouraged into sterility and commerce by the indifference of the younger generation. And as the deity loomed less terrible, and as Matt felt himself more at home in the art atmosphere of England, so the idea of making himself known to his uncle began to be shorn of its terrors, and even to be tinged with the generous thought of inspiring the neglected artist to fresh work—an inversion of attitude, the humor of which did not occur to him.
But when one afternoon he did betake himself again to the elegant emporium off Cavendish Square, and found himself face to face with the dapper young gentleman and his horseshoe cravat-pearl, the old awe of the refinement radiating from every quarter of the compass overwhelmed him, and his tongue refused to ask for Mr. Strang, compromising by a happy thought in the demand for Madame. Madame appeared forthwith, flashing upon him a sense of matronly sweetness and silk, and snatching him from the embarrassment of openings by exclaiming in her charming accent:
“Ah, you’ve come for your change.”
“What change?” asked Matt.
“You left sixpence on the desk. I noted it down.”
“It is very kind of you,” said Matt. “I had no idea you would remember me all this time.”
“I never forget clever people,” said Madame, with a bewitching smile.
“How do you know I’m clever?” Matt smiled back.
Madame waved away the question with her plump white hand in silent smiling reaffirmation. “I’ve always lived with clever people,” she said, simply. “Talent is the only thing I admire in this world.”
Matt said lamely that he was glad to hear it. The phrase was a poor expression of his pleasure in at last meeting a soul with his own ideals.
“Where was it you saw my husband’s pictures?” asked Madame, eagerly.
Matt flushed. “I didn’t see any,” he confessed. “My father told me about them.”
“Where did your father see them?”
“At home, when they were boys together.”
“What! They were school-fellows?”
“Brothers!” said Matt, and felt the instant relief of criminal confession.
Madame uttered a little cry of delighted astonishment, and took Matt’s hands in hers.
“My dear sir, my dear sir!” she cried, shaking them, “I knew you were clever. Come inside—come inside. Why didn’t you say who you were last time? You are the boy who wrote to Matthew from Nova Scotia years ago! What a pity he is out! He will be so charmed.”
And, still holding his hands, she led him up a little flight of stairs into a daintily furnished sitting-room, resplendent with pictures, and sat him down in a soft arm-chair, and hung admiringly over him, and plied him with inquiries as to his past and his projects and things Nova Scotian (without always waiting for an answer, or ever getting more than a brief generality), and rang for claret and cake, which were brought in by a pretty girl in a piquant white cap, but which Matt refused for fear of seeming to be in want of refreshment.
“I have a son who is also an artist—oh, so clever, the dear boy!” she told him. “You must know him—you will love each other. He is at work now in his studio; but he must not be interrupted till the light fails.”
Matt’s eyes kindled. “I shall like to know him,” he cried, fervently.
“Yes, dear Herbert! Oh, you’ve no idea how sweet and good and clever he is! He’s twenty-three, yet as obedient as a child. We’re so proud of him—his father and I. He quite consoles us for the failure of the English to appreciate Matthew’s work.”
“Oh, where can I see uncle’s work?” asked Matt, eagerly.
Madame shook her head sadly. “Oh, he parted with all his pictures ever so many years ago,” she said.
“But aren’t they exhibited anywhere?”
“We don’t know. They must be some day, if they are not destroyed, for they are so clever. But the fact is—though, of course, I wouldn’t tell it to a stranger—we had to—to—pawn them, and they were never redeemed, and poor Matthew never would paint again, he was so embittered. Oh, it was such a slow, sad struggle, those early days of our married life! For years no one would buy poor Matthew’s work, and when the money he had brought from Nova Scotia gave out we should have starved if I had not started a little dress-maker’s shop. They still call me Madame,” she interpolated, with a melancholy smile.
“But youareFrench, aren’t you?” said Matt, thrilling with the pathos of those far-away struggles.
“Yes, my parents were French, but I have spoken English almost from girlhood.”
“There is French blood in our family, too,” murmured Matt, with a sad recollection of his mother. He wondered what she was doing at the moment.
“Indeed! Perhaps that was what drew me to Matthew—that and his artistic genius. Poor Matthew!”
“But you are well off now?” said Matt, dubiously. He did not trouble to correct her mistake, to explain that the French blood was on the spindle side.
“Oh, we are rich. We have all we want. When my dress-maker’s business grew prosperous—in fact, quite a fashionable resort—Matthew, who could not bear to be out of touch with art, though he had sworn never to paint again, saw his way to dealing in pictures. Of course, he makes far more than any of his artist friends who succeeded, but that does not console me for the pictures the world has lost.”
“But why doesn’t he paint now that he has money?” inquired Matt.
“He says he’s too old,” said Madame, sighing. “And besides, he thinks he’d only be eclipsed by Herbert. Of course, Herbertisexceptionally gifted; he took the medal at the Royal Academy Schools, you know, for the best copy of an Old Master, and he has had advantages which were denied to his poor father. But still it often makes me cry to think of how hesinks himself in the dear boy, not caring a jot about his own reputation. Oh, there are few such fathers, I can tell you. I don’t know what I have done to deserve such a husband, I who have no cleverness or talent of any kind.”
And here, as at his cue, Matthew Strang entered, in a soft hat and a black cloak vastly more impressive than the staid shabbiness of Tarmigan, than whom his Vandyke beard alone gave him the greater artistic distinction. He leaned slightly upon a gnarled walking-stick.
Madame sprang up to meet him in the doorway. “Oh, Matthew!” she cried, ecstatically, “the young man who wanted to see you is your own nephew. And he is come to study art. And won’t it be delightful for Herbert to have a companion? I made him wait for you—I knew you wouldn’t be long.” And radiant beneath her cap, Madame stepped aside, as if to leave the stage free for the rapturous embrace between the uncle and his long-lost nephew. But Matthew Strang stood rigid with astonishment, only his eyes moving in startled examination of the young man, who had risen respectfully.
For an interval of seconds that seemed numerable in minutes he looked at Matt without speaking, leaning on his stick, his saturnine face growing momently darker.
“Davie’s son, I suppose,” he said, slowly, at last.
“Yes, sir,” said Matt.
“H’m! I might have seen it. So you have come to England, after all?”
“Yes, sir. But not till I had the money for my studies.”
Matthew Strang’s face lightened a little. “Sit down! Sit down! No need to stand,” he said, with uneasy graciousness, placing his disengaged hand on Matt’s shoulder. “And how are all your folks?”
“Oh, they’re pretty spry, thank you,” said Matt, resuming his chair.
“Let me see—your mother married again, didn’t she?”
Matt nodded.
“She’s still alive, I suppose?”
“Ye-es,” faltered Matt.
“And how’s the Province?”
“It’s about the same,” said Matt, vaguely.
“Ha!” said Mr. Strang, with an all-comprehending air.
He allowed Madame to divest him lovingly of his cloak. Then he said: “You’re settled in London, then?”
“I shall stay here some time.”
“Humph! You’re not like your father. He could never stay in one place. Well, well, I’m sure I wish you success, but you know it’s not an easy line you’ve gone into.”
“So you wrote to me, sir.”
“Ha! Well, I wrote the truth.”
“I was much obliged to you, sir, for your advice,” said Matt, sincerely.
But the elder man, suspecting sarcasm, replied half defiantly: “There’s not one man in a thousand that makes his bread-and-butter by it. Why, I’ve just bought a picture from an A.R.A. for fifty pounds; it’s worth treble. You would have done better at your farm—or was it a saw-mill?”
“It isn’t the money I was thinking of, sir; it’s the joy of painting.”
“Hum! I talked like that once.” Matthew Strang sat down rather peevishly and crossed his legs.
“And you talk like that now, too,” said Madame, with gentle reproach. “Not for yourself,” she corrected, hastily, as his eyebrows took their interrogative altitude. “But you know you don’t care if Herbert doesn’t make money for years, so long as he makes a reputation eventually.”
“Herbert is in a different position. He doesn’t need to earn anything.”
“Nor does your nephew,” said Madame. “He has ample resources, he tells me.”
Matt blushed at Madame’s unconscious magnification of his curt statement on the point, but he did not think it worth while contradicting her. Matthew uncrossed his legs restlessly. “I suppose your mother married a well-to-do man?”
“Yes, pretty well-to-do,” Matt stammered.
“Why didn’t you say who you were at first?”
“I didn’t like to. I—I remembered you had advised me not to come to England.”
“Well, the mischief was done; you might just as well have spoken. I might have given you some advice.... You could have had the engraving at trade price.... If you are looking for etchings, or any little things for your rooms, I couldn’t dream of treating you like a stranger.”
“Thank you,” said Matt, with feeble fervency.
“Don’t mention it,” said his uncle, holding up his right palm deprecatingly. “By-the-way, what made you address your letter to the National Gallery?”
Matt colored. “I thought all the London painters lived there,” he said, with an uneasy smile.
Madame laughed heartily. “Why, Matthew only got it through an official inquiring among the people copying pictures there. One of them happened to be a customer of ours, and suggested trying us.”
“Yes, it was all boyish foolishness,” said Matt.
“And where are you living, now that you have come?” said his uncle.
“Not far from here—in Holborn.” He added, hastily, for fear his uncle might be meditating a visit: “I can bring you some of my work if you like.”
“Oh yes, do! Won’t that be charming!” interjected Madame, clapping her hands.
Matthew checked her with a stern glance. “I don’t think I should be able to do anything with an unknown man,” he said, shaking his head.
“No, I don’t mean that,” said Matt, getting hot. “I thought you might like to see that I wasn’t quite a duffer. I don’t expect to sell my work yet, but they think I’m rather promising at the school.”
“What school? Who thinks?”
“Tarmigan.”
“Tarmigan!” echoed Matthew Strang. “Why, I could have picked up one of his water-colors for a fiver last week. Tarmigan has been going down steadily for the last four years. He took the gold medal at the Academy, and at first promised well. Ten years ago I even meditated a corner in him, but luckily I had the sense to sell out in time, before it was quitecertain he would never even be an Associate. No wonder he’s reduced to visiting.”
“Oh, but he does that for nothing, they say,” protested Matt, hotly. “He’s a jolly fine chap!”
“Ha! No wonder he doesn’t get on. Who ever heard of a really good man wasting his time in that way?”
“Then don’t you think I’m doing any good studying under him?” asked Matt, in affright.
“Oh, he’s all right for teaching; I haven’t a word against him. He’s one of the few men in England who are supposed to know their trade. But he’s too stilted and classical; there’s no sentiment in him; he don’t touch the heart of the buying public. It’s all science and draughtsmanship, and he won’t do anything to meet the market half way.”
“It’s spunky of him to stick to his convictions, anyhow,” said Matt, in low tones, provoked by his uncle’s disparagement into a recrudescent enthusiasm for Tarmigan, who had recently been weighing upon him like a nightmare.
“Bah! and how does he know his convictions are right? The public’s the best judge of art.”
“Oh!” said Matt, deprecatingly. “Should you really think that’s so?”
“Of course I think so. Would the public haveme? No. And the public was right.” He looked at Matt half fiercely, as if defying him to deny it. Madame was smiling and shaking her head. “The public’s always right,” he went on, emphatically. “It’s the critics that throw the market into perpetual confusion. Such a babel of voices, all laying down what is right and what is wrong, what is art and what is not art, that it’s enough to drive a dealer crazy. For my part, I steer by the Academy; that’s my polestar, and I’m rarely out, for that’s what the public take their reckoning by. And it’s an R.A. that my boy is going to be, please God, for theories may come and theories may go, but the Academy goes on forever.”
“Dear Herbert!” murmured Madame.
“I suppose he’s awfully advanced,” said Matt, wistfully.
“Years ago he took the medal for the best copy of an Old Master at the Royal Academy Schools, where he is now justfinishing his course,” explained his uncle. “And you know you can’t even begin the course without being clever.”
“No, I know,” said Matt, with a sinking of heart, for he had by this time studied the prospectus of the national art-schools and been dismayed, not so much by the anatomical information and technical expertness demanded at the entrance competition as by the slow-dragging septennial course, the drudgery of still-life and perspective and the antique, and all the tedious grind of convention. “I thought of trying to get in myself, but I’m afraid I shall have to give up the idea.”
“Oh, Herbert only drops in there now and then,” said Matthew, loftily. “He works mostly at home with his own models.”
Matt had a pang of envy.
“And then he has always had the benefit of your experience,” he said.
“Oh, I can’t pretend to have done more than encourage him.”
“Now, Matthew,” said Madame, shaking her finger fondly, “you know it was at your knee that he made his first studies.”
Matthew smiled faintly, not displeased. “I’m like Tarmigan: I can teach better than I can paint,” he said, and poured himself out a glass of wine, fascinating Matt’s eye by the play of light in the diamond on his forefinger. “If I listened to my wife, I should give up business and set up an easel again, as in my young and foolish days. Thank God,” he said, pausing to gulp down the claret, “I had sense to stop in time! What could be expected of a young man who’d lived on a farm in a God-forsaken country? Ah, your father was right! He never would allow any merit to my ships or cows.”
Red sands flitted before Matt’s vision, with lambent pools, and overhead a diaphanous rosy vapor, beyond which brooded the vast cloudless circle of the sky. Ah, God! why was the sky so blue and depthless in those days? As from dim, far-away caverns, the acrid voice of the picture-dealer reached his ears in complacent exposition: “It’s all training, and if you don’t get trained young, you might as well attempt to fly.”
Becoming conscious of a silence, Matt answered, “That’s so.”
“It’s the same with music,” went on his uncle, tapping impressively on his wineglass with his glittering forefinger. “You can’t expect a grown-up man to sit down and practise scales like a little girl in a pinafore; and even if he would, his fingers have lost their suppleness, his joints are set. I saw this clearly, and was determined my boy shouldn’t suffer as I’d done. Why, Herbert had a brush put into his hand before he could write!”
Matt’s heart sank lower.
“I should like to see his work,” he said, anxiously.
“Ha!” said Matthew, a complacent smile hovering about his lips.
“Oh yes, let him see Herbert’s work,” pleaded Madame.
“I don’t think we ought to disturb him,” said Matthew, yieldingly. “Won’t you take another glass of wine?”
“No, thank you, sir,” said Matt, who was quite faint, for his dinner had been of the slightest; and feeling the request a signal to take his leave, he rose.
“Oh yes, do let him see them,” said Madame, hurriedly. “It’s only for once.”
“Oh, well, as you’re a sort of relation,” said the father, imposingly. “But I make it a point not to interrupt him. These hours are precious; there’s not too much light at the best of times.” And, as if following Matt’s impulse, he rose and turned doorward.
“There’s no need for you to trouble, Josephine,” he said, waving her back.
As they mounted the soft-carpeted staircase, on which undraped marble statues looked down from their niches, he explained, gravely, “There’s a male model up there, you see.”
Matt nodded, awed to silence by the splendor of the staircase, up which he toiled side by side with the Vandyke beard and the velvet coat.
“Herbert, of course, uses the side door,” vouchsafed his companion, graciously, to relieve the monotony of the long ascent. “I couldn’t have his models coming through the shop.”
Matt murmured something negative, but his reply was lost in a dull thud from above. The elder man cleared the remaining stairs in alarm, and threw open the door.
“Give us a hand up, you beggar,” a piping girlish voice was saying.
On the rich carpet of the vast, elegant studio, whose glories dazzled Matt’s vision, a slim young man was sprawling on his back. Over him stood a stalwart figure, clad only in boxing-gloves.
The saturnine picture-dealer rushed forward and helped his boy up.
“It’s all right, dad,” said Herbert, in unembarrassed amusement as he was scrambling to his feet. “I just wanted to give the model’s arms a little movement during the rest. The position’s so difficult for him, I haven’t been able to get the thing right all day. Look! there’s nothing at all on the canvas; I’ve had to paint it out.”
The model had somewhat shamefacedly taken off his gloves and struck an attitude upon the throne.
“Ha!” said Matthew Strang, in vague accents. “You ought to be getting on faster with those gold-medal studies, now that you have put aside your picture for this year’s Academy. You will need all your time, you know. I’ve brought you a visitor.”
Herbert turned his face towards the door—the handsome, glowing face of a boy, beardless and clean-shaven, with candid blue eyes and tumbled flaxen hair, and the flash of white teeth accustomed to display themselves in laughter. There was his father’s interrogative mark about the arched eyebrows as he caught sight of Matt, hanging back timidly on the threshold.
The young Nova-Scotian’s heart was leaden, his soul wrapped in a gloom which had been gathering blackness ever since he had set foot in his uncle’s shop, and which the sight of the commodious studio, with its rich properties and luxurious appliances, its crimson lounges and silk drapings and fleecy rugs and gleaming marbles and bronzes, had darkened into despair. The penurious past surged back to him through a suffusion of unshed tears—tears that were salt with the sense of injustice and of sorrows unforgettable, all the creeping, irremediable years contributing their quintessence to the bitterness of this supreme moment: the chances he had missed, the lessons he had not received, the obstacles that had rather sprung up to beat him back,whose infant fingers no loving hand had ever guided, whose boyish yearnings no word of encouragement had ever sweetened, whose youth had been all distasteful labors and mean tragedies and burdens too great to bear, and whose very triumph would find none to sympathize with it, if it came, as it never could come to one so untrained, so alien from the world of art and elegant studios and all the soft things of life; driven to the scum of the streets for models at a few pence an hour, and reduced to studying attitudes from his own contortions before a bleared strip of mirror in a dingy back room; unregarded, uncared-for, unknown, an atom in that vast magic-gleaming London which had so cruelly disillusioned him, and in which even the one heart in which his own blood ran was cold and far away; his poor pre-eminence at Grainger’s, his primacy among a set of duffers, no augury of success in that fierce struggle in which Tarmigan himself had gone to the wall. Was it worth while to vex himself endlessly, swirled to and fro like a bubble on an ocean? Were it not sweeter to break, and to be resolved into the vastness and the silence?
His right hand wandered towards his hip-pocket, where his pistol lay. How good to be done with life! Then he became aware, through a semi-transparent mist, that the gracious blond boy was holding out his hand with a frank smile, and instinct drew out his own right hand in amicable response, and so the temptation was over. The poor children dependent upon him came up to memory, and he wondered at his spasm of selfish despair.
His uncle must have said words to which he had been deaf, for Herbert seemed to know who he was and why he had come.
“Welcome, fair coz,” he said, gripping Matt’s hand heartily. “I feel as if I were in Shakespeare. A moment ago I scarcely remembered I had a relation in the world. Confound it! why weren’t you a girl cousin while you were about it?”
“Herbert, don’t be rude,” said his father.
Herbert elevated his blond eyebrows. “I wish you would cultivate a sense of humor, dad,” he observed, wearily. Matt, who was responding to his grip, fascinated instantly by the boyish,sunny charm, loosed his clasp in sheer astonishment at the transition.
Matthew Strang disregarded his son’s observation, but gruffly told the model, whose attitudinizing immobility was irritating, that he need not pose for a moment or two, whereupon Herbert bade him begone altogether. “I’ve been off color all day,” he observed, explanatorily, as he counted out the model’s silver, “but the excitement of discovering I am not alone in the world is the finishing touch.”
Matthew threw a rather reproachful look at Matt, whose eyes drooped guiltily. He raised them immediately, however, in accordance with his uncle’s instructions, to admire a study of a draped figure which was hung on a wall. The coloring struck him agreeably, though he found a certain feebleness in the drawing which was equally agreeable to his jealous mood. This not displeasing impression was borne out by the other pictures and sketches for which his uncle besought his admiration: always this facile poetic coloring and this indifferent draughtsmanship, this suggestion of difficulties shirked rather than of difficulties overcome; at last seen to be due to the conventional composition, most of the works, whether in chalk or water-color or oil, being pretty landscapes or single-figure studies in simple attitudes, or, when complicated by other figures, embracing episodes which seemed to have been transferred direct from other pictures, some of which, indeed, Matt had seen either in the originals or in engravings. To his astonishment, Herbert, who had been yawning widely, drew his attention to one such little bit.
“Don’t you recognize that?” he said. “Dad did at once. It’s a quotation from Millais.”
Matt looked puzzled at the phrase.
“ ‘Cribbing,’ the unwise it call,” expounded Herbert, “and so did dad, till I explained to him it was only quoting. When a great writer hits off a phrase it passes into the language, and when a great painter hits off a new effect of technique, or gets a happy grouping, I contend it belongs to the craft, as much as the primitive tricks of scumbling or glazing. We praise the mellow Virgilisms in Tennyson, but we are down upon the painter who repeats another’s lines. The Old Masters borrowed unblushingly,but we are such sticklers for originality, which, after all, only means plagiarizing nature. Didn’t Raphael crib his composition from Orcagna, and Michael Angelo copy Masaccio, and Tintoretto turn Michael Angelo’s Samson into Jupiter? Why, in the Academy at Venice I saw—”
“Have you been to Venice?” cried Matt, eagerly.
“Herbert has been to all the galleries of Europe,” said his father, impressively. “We travel abroad every year. It’s part of the education of a painter. How are you to know Bellini and Tintoretto if you don’t go to Venice? Velasquez and Titian cannot be fully studied by any one who has not been in Madrid; and the man who is ignorant of the treasures of the Louvre or of the Uffizi at Florence, where”—he interpolated with simulated facetiousness, laying his hand on Herbert’s shoulder—“I hope to see my boy’s portrait painted by his own hand one day—”
“Look at this queer stone scarab,” interrupted Herbert, annoyed. “I picked it up in Egypt; comes from inside a mummy-case.”
Egypt! The word fell like music on Matt’s ears. The rose-light of romance illumined the uncouth beetle. Herbert hastened to exhibit his other curios: coins, medals, cameos, scarves, yataghans, pottery, ivories, with a cursive autobiographical commentary, passing rapidly to another object whenever his father threatened to take up the thread of autobiography.
And as Matt handled these picturesque trophies of travel, that wafted into the studio the aroma of foreign bazaars, the wave of hopelessness resurged, swamping even the fresh hopefulness engendered by the discovery that his cousin’s craftsmanship was not so far beyond his hand, after all; all those marvellous, far-off old-world places that had disengaged themselves from his lonely readings, fair mirages thrown upon a phantasmal sky, not vaguely, but with the sensuous definiteness of a painter’s vision, jostling one another like the images in a shaken kaleidoscope in an atmosphere of romantic poetry: Venice, dreaming on its waters in an enchanted moonlight; Paris, all life and light; Spain, with cathedrals and gypsies and cavaliers tinkling guitars; Sicily, with gray olive-trees and sombre cypresses and terraced gardensand black-eyed peasant women with red snoods; the Rhine, haunted by nixies and robber-chiefs, meandering ’twixt crumbling castles perched on wooded crags; Egypt, with its glow and color, all lotus-blossoms and bulrushes and crocodiles and jasper idols, and bernoused Arabs galloping on silken chargers in a land of sand and sphinxes and violet shadows; the Indies, east of the sun and west of the moon, full of palm-trees and nautch-girls and bayaderes—a shifting panorama of strange exotic cities, steeped in romance and history and sunshine and semi-barbarian splendors, where the long desolation of his native winter never came, nor the clammy vapors of Britain; cities of splendid dream, where anything might happen and nothing could seem unreal; where Adventure waited masked at every street corner, and Love waved a white hand from every lattice. And in a flood of sadness, that had yet something delicious in it, he pitied himself for having been cut off from all these delectable experiences, which the happier Herbert had so facilely enjoyed.
“I know you are bored, father,” said Herbert, pausing amid his exposition. “You want to get back to business, and Matt and I want to yarn.”
Matt’s bitterness was soothed. It thrilled him to be called Matt by this rich, refined, travelled young gentleman.
“Well, good-bye, my young friend,” said his uncle, holding out his hand for the first time. “I dare say I shall see you again. Ha! Drop in any time you’re passing. I think your mother will be wanting you presently, Herbert.”
He moved to the door, then paused, and, turning his head uneasily, said: “And if you ever want any advice, you know, don’t hesitate to ask me.” And with a faint friendly nod of his Vandyke beard he went out, closing the door carefully behind him.
“Awful bore, the governor,” said Herbert, stretching his arms. “He never knows when he’sde trop.”
Matt did not know whatde tropwas, except when he saw it printed, but the disrespectful tone jarred upon him.
“You owe him a good deal, it seems to me,” he replied, simply.
“Hullo, hullo, my young Methodist parson!” and Herbert threw back his head in a ringing laugh which made his whiteteeth gleam gayly. “Why, do you think we owe anything to our parents? They didn’t marry to oblige us. I am only a tool for his ambitions.”
“What do you mean?” murmured Matt.
“Oh, well, I oughtn’t to talk about it, perhaps, but you’re my first cousin—the first cousin I’ve ever had”—Matt smiled, fascinated afresh—”and, after all, it’s an open secret that he wants the name of Strang to live in the annals of painting—if it couldn’t be Matthew Strang, it must be Herbert Strang, and so he belongs to the minor artists’ clubs. Of course, he can’t get into the Limners’, though he contrives to be there on business pretty often, and consoles himself by using their note-paper; but at the Gillray and the Reynolds’ they dare not blackball him, because the committee always owe him money, or want to sell him pictures; but I dare say they laugh at him behind his back when he jaws to them about art in general, and my talents in particular. It’s confoundedly annoying. Oh, I’ve been forgetting to smoke. What can be the matter with me?” And he pulled out a lizard-skin case, from which Matt, not liking to refuse, drew forth a cigarette.
“But what good does he do by belonging to those clubs?” he asked.
“Oh, he likes it, for one thing,” replied Herbert, striking a match and holding it to Matt’s cigarette. “My belief is, he only went into the picture business to rub shoulders with artists, though where the charm comes in I have never been able to find out, for a duller, a more illiterate set of fellows I never wish to meet. Shop is all they can talk. And then, of course, it’s good for business. But in the background lurks, I feel sure, the idea of advancing my interests, of accumulating back-stairs influence, of pulling the ropes that shall at last lift me into the proud position of R.A. Nay, who knows?” he said, puffing out his first wreath of smoke—“President of the Royal Academy!” And he laughed melodiously.
“Well, but—” began Matt, inhaling the delicious scent of the tobacco.
“Well,but,” echoed Herbert. “That’s just it. My tastes are not considered in the matter at all. Art! Art! Art! Nothingbut Art rammed down my throat till I’m sick of the sight of a canvas. I was a connoisseur in my cradle, and sucked a maul-stick instead of a monkey-on-a-stick, and I live in the midst of Art and out of the profits of it. It’s pictures, pictures everywhere, and not a—Oh, have a brandy-and-soda, won’t you? Don’t stand about as if you were going.” Matt obediently dropped upon a lounge that yielded deliciously to his pressure. The fragrant smoke curled about his face, while his cousin made pleasant play with popping corks and gurgling liquids.
“But don’t you really like painting?” he asked, in astonishment.
“I like some things in it well enough,” replied Herbert, “but it’s such beastly drudgery. All this wretched copying of models is no better than photography. And a camera would do the tiding in a thousandth part of the time. I always work from photographs when I can.”
“But is that artistic?” said Matt, slightly shocked.
“It’s the only thing worthy of the artist’s dignity. The bulk of art is journeyman’s work. Besides, lots of ’em do it nowadays—with magic-lanterns to boot! Because one man by a fluke happens to be a better drawing-machine than another, is he to be counted the greater artist?” Matt felt small before this answer to his secret criticism. “Did you ever see the camera-obscura at the Crystal Palace? That does landscapes in a jiffy that we should go messing over for months. And then think of the looking-glass! They talk of Rembrandt and Franz Hals. I’ll back a bedroom mirror to put more life into its portraits than either of ’em. Why, if some process were invented—a sort of magic mirror to fix the image, living and colored, in the glass—here’s luck!”—he clinked his glass against Matt’s—”the governor would have to shut up shop.”
“Yes, but the mirror hasn’t got any imagination,” urged Matt, setting down his glass refreshed, the glow of brandy in his throat lending added intellectual charm to the discussion.
“Oh, I don’t know! There are distorting mirrors,” rejoined Herbert, laughing. “But you are quite right. Art is selection; natureà travers d’un tempérament. Art is autobiography. But painting, which somehow monopolizes the name of Art, isreally the lowest form of Art. Nature is full of scenes quite as good as Art. Doesn’t Ruskin say an artist has got to copy Nature? But is there anything in Nature so closely akin to a poem, or to Ruskin’s own prose, or to a symphony of Beethoven, as a moonlit sea or a beautiful woman is to a picture? What is the skylark’s song compared to Shelley’s, or the music of the sea to Mozart’s? The real creation is in the other arts, which are called literature and music. They are an addition to Nature—something extra. Painting and acting—these are mere reduplications of Nature. Perhaps I was unfair to painting. That, at least, fixes the beauty of Nature, but acting is merely an evanescent imitation of the temporary.”
The younger man sat half bewildered beneath this torrent of words and quotations; the respect Herbert had lost in his eyes by his draughtsmanship (a trifling matter under Herbert’s disdainful analysis) returning, multiplied to reverence, and with a fresh undercurrent of humility and envy. How much there was to know in the world, how many languages and books and arts! How could he mix with Herbert and his set without being found out?
“That’s why I prefer literature and music,” said Herbert. “But then I’m not my own master, like you—you lucky beggar. If I had my way, pictures would be nothing but color-schemes, sheer imagination, with no relation to truth of Nature. What do I care how her shadows fall, if they don’t fall gracefully? And then why must my lines imitate Nature’s? That’s where the Japanese are so great. Don’t smoke that fag-end! Have another!” And he threw his cigarette-case across to his magnetized listener. It was the first time in his hard, busy existence Matt had ever heard any one talk like a book, discussing abstract relations of Art and Life.
“I wish I knew as much as you,” he said, naïvely.
“I wish I was as free as you,” retorted Herbert, laughingly; “though I certainly wouldn’t employ my liberty as you do. What in Heaven’s name made you want to study Art? I did laugh when the governor told the mater of your letter. I was just in the roughest grind, and felt like writing you on the sly to warn you.”
“I don’t think I should have taken your advice,” said Matt, with an embarrassed laugh.
“But what made you come to London, anyhow? Why didn’t you go to Paris?”
“To Paris!”
“Yes; there’s no teaching to be got in London.”
“No?” Matt turned pale.
“No. At least, that’s what everybody says in England. Paris alone has the tradition. Once it was Holland, once Florence, and now it’s Paris. Why, in Paris any fellows who club together can get the biggest men to visit them free, gratis, for nothing. Here the big pots prefer the society of the swells.”
“Then why are you not in Paris?” asked Matt, rallying.
“Ah! That’s where my governor is such an idiot. He pretends to think there’s more chance for a man who’s been through the Academy Schools; he gets known to the R.A.’s, and all that. But his real reason is that he’s afraid to trust me in Paris by myself.”
“No?” said Matt, in sympathetic incredulity.
“Yes; that’s why he had this room knocked into a studio for me—it always reminds me of a nursery, at the top of the house-and even selects my female models, knows their parents, and that sort of thing. It’s all sheer selfishness, I tell you, and I’m just sick of all this perpetual fussing and worrying over me, as if I were a prize pig or a race-horse. A man of twenty-three not allowed to have a studio or chambers of his own! You don’t realize how lucky you are, my boy. If I could afford it I’d chuck up the governor to-morrow. But I’m dependent on him for every farthing. And all he allows me for pocket-money is—well, you’d never guess—”
Matt did not make the attempt; he judged Herbert might think meanly of even a pound a week, but he did not dare to hazard a guess.
“Three hundred a year! And out of that I’ve got to get my clothes and pay my models, confound ’em!”
Matt stared in startled, reverential envy.
“Yes, you may well stare. Why, you know yourself if you buy a woman a bracelet it runs away with a month’s allowance.But, talking of clothes, you’ll have to get better than those things, if you ever want me to be seen with you.”
“These are quite new,” murmured Matt, in alarm.
“Andoriginal,” added Herbert. “I’ll have to introduce you to my tailor.”
“Is—is he dear?” Matt stammered.
“If you pay him,” said Herbert, dryly.
“Oh, I always pay,” protested Matt.
“You’re lucky.Ihave to economize.”
Matt thought suddenly of William Gregson with a throb of gratitude. At least his wardrobe boasted of unimpeachable boots. Then he suddenly espied a small battalion of foot-gear ranged against a wall—black boots, brown boots, patent shoes, brown shoes, boots with laces, boots with beautiful buttons—and he relapsed into his primitive humility. Uneasy lest Herbert should insist on equipping him similarly, he was glad to remember that Herbert’s mother was expecting her boy, and with a murmur to that effect rose to go.
“Nonsense!” said Herbert, “I’m not due till dinner-time; but if you must be going, I think I’ll just stroll a little. You go towards Oxford Street, don’t you?”
“Ye-es,” faltered Matt, who was a little frightened at the idea that his dainty cousin might accompany him to his lodging.
“All right. I’ll just go to the club to see if there are any letters. There’s another of your privileges, confound you! I can’t have any letters come to my own place.”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Do you think I’d have the governor nosing my correspondence? He’d be always asking questions. It’s a jolly little club—I’ll put you up for it if you like. Take another cigarette; take half a dozen; put ’em in your pocket.”
As they were going down-stairs, Matt said he would like to say good-bye to Madame, so they passed into the sitting-room.
“Au revoir, my dear nephew,au revoir!” said Madame, shaking both his hands. “I said you and Herbert would love each other. You will find your sixpence awaiting you on the desk.”
“FunnyI’ve never been to see your place. I must look you up one day.” Thus Herbert at uncertain intervals, but he never carried out his threat. His life was too full, and he had been accustomed from childhood to have the mountain come to Mohammed. And so, gradually, Matt, who had at first lived half apprehensive of an exposure, half wishful that Herbert should become rudely aware of his real position, surrendered himself to the magnetism of his cousin’s manner, and weakly tried to live up to that young gentleman’s misconception of him whenever they were together; even submitting to a morning suit and an evening dress from Herbert’s tailor for an undefined sum at an unmentioned date. For if the disadvantages of Herbert’s society were many, if he had to starve for days to return Herbert’s club hospitality at a restaurant, still he was satisfied the game was worth the candle. From Herbert he felt himself acquiring polish and refinement and impeccable English and social lore; Herbert was an intellectual stimulus, with thoughts to give away and the newest poets to lend; Herbert was bright and gay, charming away the vapors of youthful despondency. But, above all, Herbert sometimes allowed him to work in his studio, amid the sensuous beauty of draping and decoration and statuary that lapped his artistic nature like a soft summer sea—a privilege inestimable, but, in view of the mere model, worth at least all the extra money this friendship cost him. It befell thus:
On Matt’s second visit Herbert said, good-naturedly:
“I’ve just laid my palette. You sit down. Let’s see what you can do.”
“May I?” cried Matt, eagerly. There was a costume-model on the throne—a dark-eyed beauty in Oriental drapery.
Herbert relinquished the brush and threw himself upon his back on the couch, puffing lazily at his cigarette.
“By Jove!” he said, after ten minutes, “you’ve put that in all right. But what a juicy style you’ve got! Where did you get that from?”
“I can’t do it any other way,” said Matt, apologetically.
“The governor told me you’re under Tarmigan. He never taught you that?”
“No; but that’s the way I’ve always worked. I did a lot of portraits in Nova Scotia.”
“The devil you did! No wonder you’ve made money, confound you! I thought you were a blooming ignoramus just come over to learn your pictorial pothooks and hangers.”
“I thought so, too,” said Matt, flushing with pleasure and modesty.
“None of your sarcasm, you beggar. You can finish the head if you like.”
“Thank you,” said Matt, flutteringly. He felt as if Herbert were heaping coals of fire upon his own head, repaying his first secret depreciation by over-generous praise. He painted away bravely, soon losing himself in the happy travail of execution.
“I must come down to your place and see your work,” said Herbert, looking up from the volume of Swinburne in which he had immersed himself.
“Oh, there isn’t much!” said Matt, hastily. “I’ll bring you some little things next time. Only I don’t want your father to see them—they’re not for sale.”
“You’re quite right,” said Herbert. “Don’t show ’em to him. Hush!”
“What’s the matter?” asked Matt, turning his head.
“Talk of the—Old Gentleman,” said Herbert.
The brush dropped from the painter’s palsied fingers. He felt like one caught red-handed. He had already come in, somewhat surreptitiously, through the side door, in obedience to Herbert’s recommendation, and to be found using Herbert’s appliances and model would be the acme of guiltiness.
The alarm was false, but thenceforward “The Old Gentleman” indicated Matthew Strang the elder. For they had frequent occasion to fear his advent, since Matt came often, tempted from his gloomy back room to the beautiful light studio, where he was allowed not only to do bits of Herbert’s work while Herbert read or gossiped with the model, but occasionally to set up another easel and use the same model. But they were only detected together twice by the Vandyke beard and the velvet coat, and on one occasion Herbert had had time to resume the brush, and on another to pose Matt as a model.
“The Old Gentleman’s rather grumpy about you,” he admitted, with his customary candor. “I’ve had to tell the servant not to mention your coming so often. The mater’s mashed on you, and I suppose he’s a bit jealous. She wanted to ask you to our dinner-party last night—we had two Associates, and a Scotch Academician, and an American millionaire who buys any rot, and an art critic who praises it—but he said one didn’t give dinner-parties for one’s relations, but for strangers.”
As Matt had already dined onceen famille, with Madame’s guileless homage at his side to put him at ease, he did not feel himself hardly used.
His position with “The Old Gentleman” was not improved by his demeanor on an occasion when, meeting him in the doorway, Herbert’s father, instead of raising remonstrant eyebrows, astonished him by asking if he would like to see the masterpieces he had in stock. Matt did not know that this generous offer was due to the death of a member of the Institute whose watercolors had been accumulating on Matthew Strang’s hands, and who now, even before his funeral, was showing signs of a posthumous “boom;” he replied eagerly that nothing could be a greater favor. The picture-dealer waved his jewelled hand with pompous geniality, and, mounting one flight of stairs, with the hand on Matt’s shoulder, ushered him into the holy of holies, a chamber religious with purple curtains and hushed with soft carpets, where the more precious pictures reposed behind baize veils that for possible purchasers were lifted with a reverent silence bespeaking a hundred extra guineas. Long habit of ritual awe made Matthew Strang’s hands pious even before his nephew.
But his nephew’s expected ecstasies were tempered by unexpected criticism. In an eminent Academician’s portrait of a lady, Matt pointed out that the eyes were wrong, that pupils should be round, not squashy, and that the hot shadows made by the Indian reds under the nose were inspired by Romney. He questioned the veracity of a landscape by a costly name, demurring to the light on the under sides of the leaves as impossible under the conditions depicted; and in a historical composition by an old English master he found a lack of subtlety in the legs, and a stringy feeling throughout.
All this wanton depreciation of goods by one who was not even an interested bargainer galled the picture-dealer, conscious of overflowing good-nature, and prepared for a natural return in breathless adoration. So when Matt suggested that in a celebrated picture of a sea-beach the sea had no fluidity and was falling on the fishermen’s heads, he lost his temper and cried, sarcastically: “I think you had better open a school for R.A.’s, young man!”
Matt flushed, feeling he had been impertinent; then his sense of justice repudiated the rebuke. It was of no use pretending a thing was right when it wasn’t, he protested. He didn’t profess to get things right himself, and he only wished he could do anything half as good as the worst of these pictures. But he did know when he was wrong, even if it wouldn’t come right for all his sweating and fuming.
“A young man oughtn’t to talk till he can paint,” interrupted his uncle, severely.
“But you know what Dr. Johnson says, sir,” Matt remonstrated. “If you can’t make a plum-pudding, it’s no sign you can’t judge one.”
“Plum-puddings and pictures are very different things,” said Matthew Strang, stiffly, as though insulted by an implicit association with a pastry-cook.
“My, that’s ripping!” cried Matt, abandoning the argument at the sudden sight of a fine mellow piece of portrait-painting. “How the Old Masters got the grays! Oh, why don’t people wear wigs nowadays?”
This outburst of enthusiasm made the private exhibition closemore auspiciously than had seemed probable, but Matt was never again invited to inspect the sacred treasures. His relations with his relatives came to be limited to morning visits to Herbert, whose stairs he ascended half secretly, to watch the progress of his cousin’s studies for an ambitious picture of “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar,” the models for which he also used himself. He left his own studies behind at Herbert’s request—though reluctantly, for he was not at all satisfied with them—as a species of payment for the privilege. When, through his interest in this coming masterpiece of Herbert’s, and under the fascination of this delightful and flattering friendship, he forgot his pride and fell into the habit of regular morning work in Herbert’s company, lunch somehow came up regularly for three, though Madame was not supposed to be aware of his presence. Those were joyous lunches, full of laughter and levity, made picturesque by the romantic dress or undress of the third party, and extra palatable for Matt—when his first reluctance wore off—by the fact that they saved dinners.
“Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” was intended for next year’s Academy, Herbert told him, and he gathered from his cousin’s casual observations that it had also to be submitted beforehand to the professors at the schools, for there were strange cramping conditions as to the size of the canvas and the principal figure. But he was less interested in its destination than in its draughtsmanship. He saw the tableau in his mind’s eye the moment Herbert told him he was engaged upon it, for the scene had often figured itself to his fancy in those far-off days when his mother read the Bible to her helpless children by random prickings. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream was one of the lucky chapters, to which Matt listened without distraction as the narrative unrolled itself pictorially before his inner vision. He rapidly sketched his conception, then found he disliked it, and ultimately remembered he had unconsciously reproduced the grouping of figures in the illustration in his mother’s Bible, one of those he had colored in his childish naughtiness. Herbert protested this was no drawback, but Matt went away brooding over a more artistic arrangement, and dreamed that he was mangled by lions in a den. But in themorning he brought a new grouping for Herbert’s consideration. This Herbert picked to pieces as being against the canons.
“Don’t forget it’s for the Academy,” he said. “We mustn’t make mistakes in grammar. Some of the old buffers are worse than Tarmigan.”
“Damn Tarmigan!” cried Matt, but he had to admit ruefully that his scheme was full of solecisms. He had by this time as full an acquaintance with the rules as his senior, but with Herbert they had become instinctive. It was with a renewed sense of inferiority to his cousin, paradoxically combined with an inward raging against the Lindley Murrays of art, that Matt abandoned point after point under Herbert’s searching criticism. Herbert’s gift of pulling other people’s ideas to pieces amounted to genius. But he abandoned his original sketch also, dismissed his projected models, and devoted himself to arguing out the composition afresh.
Under the banter of the art-critic smoking cynically on the sofa, Matt was put upon his mettle to group all the figures and dispose the lines so as to escape the pitfalls lurking on every side, and likewise satisfy the conditions of the pedantic professors.
“We must get as much subject as possible into it,” explained Herbert. “They give you such a small space—only fifty by forty—that you must crowd all you know into it.”
Gradually the composition took shape, with infinite discussion, daily renewed. Matt was for pillars with curious effects of architecture. Herbert objected that pillars would make the perspective too difficult, and only consented on the laughing stipulation that Matt should work out the angles. And Herbert was very averse from Matt’s suggestions of strange original attitudes for the figures.
“That ’ll make some awfully stiff foreshortening,” he grumbled.
“What does it matter? You’ll have models,” Matt would reply.
“It’s all very well. You haven’t got to do the work,” Herbert would retort.
And when the grouping was settled, the color and the draperybrought fresh argumentation, the young men working as at a chess problem till the puzzle of arriving at the original without deserting the Academic was solved. And as, in the solution of a chess problem by a pair of heads, the suggestion of the winning moves has been so obscured by the indefinite suggestion of abortive moves by both, that neither remembers to which the final discovery of the right track was due, so Matt would have been surprised to be told that the ideas that had been retained were all his, and the ideas that had been rejected were all Herbert’s. The thought of apportioning their shares in the final scheme never crossed his mind, even though it was his hand that always held the experimentative pencil. Indeed, the technical interest of the task had absorbed every other thought, and the details of the tentative were lost in the triumph of the achieved, and obscured as by a cigarette cloud of happy mornings.
And then Herbert told his father he must have new models fresh to studios.
“I don’t want ’em from Haverstock Hill or Lillie Road,” he said—”women who’ve been hung in every gallery. I don’t want your Italians from Hatton Garden, or professionals that any of the other fellows might get hold of and extract my ideas from. Besides, new faces will give me a better chance.”
And Matthew Strang the Elder recognized there was some reason in his son’s request; but he pointed out it was not so easy to go outside the stock families, especially for figure models, and that old hands often helped the painter. But Herbert easily overrode his objections. It was only the conventional attitudinizings and foreshortenings which they understood, the quotations of art, which he was now about to abandon in deference to paternal prejudice; and so Matthew Strang, morbidly solicitous, obediently brought picturesque Orientals for Daniel and the King and the satraps and the counsellors, and blushing brunettes for the beauties of the Court; and Herbert set to work to reproduce in large on the canvas Matt’s rough charcoal scheme of the whole, and his own or Matt’s studies of the parts; and when Herbert blundered, Matt suggested with pastel a change of tone or color or outline, sometimes even taking upthe brush when Herbert was lazy—as Herbert often was. Matt was never surprised to find the work no more advanced than when he had gone away the morning before, for Herbert’s mind was on many and more important things. The Academy students were rehearsing a burlesque which he had written for their dramatic society, and he sometimes slipped out to the rehearsals, lamenting to Matt that, through his father’s insistence on steady work, he could not even play in his own piece. The only recreation allowed him was a ride in the Park on a hired hack, and even that, he grumbled, was to enable him to salute cantering R.A.’s. Sometimes he went to tea with the girl students at restaurants. Sometimes he went to balls, and was too tired on the day after to do anything but describe them. They were always painters’ dances; “The Old Gentleman blocks others,” he said. On one occasion the host was an R.A., whose son was a fellow-student at the schools, and then “The Old Gentleman chortled.”
Then there was the students’ ball, to which he convoyed Matt, who was quite dazzled by the elegance and refinement of the ladies, and almost afraid to speak to his partners, and torn afresh with envy of the beautiful life from which he had been, and must long be, shut out; not losing his discomfort till, after the supper (at which he tasted champagne for the first time), Herbert’s special circle danced the Lancers with a zest andentrainthat horrified some of the matrons, and brought back to Matt the dear old nights when he took the barn floor with little Ruth Hailey, under the placid gaze of the cows and amid the odors of the stable and the hay-mow.
For other memorable experiences, too, Matt was indebted to his easy-going cousin. There was Herbert’s club, the Bohemian, a cosey little place favored by actors and journalists, caricatures of whose sensuous faces lined the walls in company with oil-paintings and sketches more sensuous still. Matt felt measureless reverence for the men he brushed against here. He had seen some of them before in the illustrated papers which he read in shop-windows or penny news-rooms or Herbert’s studio, and he trembled lest they should detect, from his embarrassment amid the varied knives and forks andglasses, that he was only a boor with less education than the waiters. He wondered what the clever, cultured people—scraps of whose conversation floated across to him amid the popping of soda-water corks—would think if they knew he had planted potatoes, chopped logs, made sugar in the woods, and climbed masts and steeples. In the new snobbishness with which their society had infected him he could not see that these things were education, not humiliation, and he was glad that even Herbert knew little of his history, and asked less. Of other people’s histories, on the other hand, Matt heard a great deal. “Bubbles” had robbed him of his belief in royal virtue; in the smoking-room of the Bohemians society fell to pieces like a house of cards, in building which, as Herbert once said, the knaves alone had been used. It was a racing, dicing, drinking, swindling, fornicating fraternity, worm-eaten with hypocrisy. Sincerity or simplicity was “all my eye;” there was always money or a woman or position in the background.
“They talk a lot of scandal,” Matt once complained.
“My dear Matt,” remonstrated Herbert, “it’s not scandal; it’s gossip. Brixton gossips about who marries whom, Bohemia about who lives with whom. Scandal implies censure.”
Despite the scandal (or the gossip), Matt was full of curiosity to see this strange new life of clubs and restaurants and theatres (to which Herbert sometimes got paper admissions), this feverish realm of intellect and gayety, where nobody seemed to want for anything; but it sometimes came over him with an odd flash of surprise and bitterness, as he caught the gleam of white scented shoulders, or saw heavy-jowled satyrs swilling champagne, that all this settled luxury had been going on while he was tramping the snowy roads of what might have been another planet.
The feeling wore off as the London season advanced, and the tide of luxurious life rolled along the great sunny thoroughfares, or flecked the midnight streets with darting points of fire. His Puritan conscience, curiously persisting beneath all the scepticism engendered by his mother’s tragedy, had at first acquiesced but uneasily in the unscriptural view of lifethat seemed to prevail around him. But fainter and fainter grew its prickings, the sensuous in him ripened in this liberal atmosphere, and that Greek conception of a beautiful world which, budding for him in solitude, had been almost nipped by the same cruel tragedy, flowered now in the heats of an ardent city.
“The Old Gentleman” was in such good-humor at the surprising progress of Herbert’s “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” that Madame’s gentle remonstrance that he ought to do something for Matt touched a responsive chord, and before the Academy sending-in day Matt had the privilege of being escorted by his uncle, in company with Herbert, to aconversazioneat the Reynolds Club, of which the dealer was a member. Herbert was soon lost in the crush of second-rate painters and engravers and obscurely famous visitors who gathered before the members’ would-be Academy pictures that lined the walls, or the second-rate entertainers who struck attitudes on the daïs; but Matt was too nervous amid this congestion of celebrities to detach himself from his uncle, who did the honors grandly, pointing out the lions of the club with a proprietorial air. Matt could not but feel that his uncle (who was of the swallow-tailed minority) was himself one of the lions of the club, and in very truth he was its most distinguished-looking member. “The refreshments are not gratis,” he told Matt, “but of course you can have anything you like at my expense. Will you have a cup of coffee, or are you one of those degenerate young men who can’t live without whiskey-and-water?” But Matt had no appetite for anything; he was too fluttered by this close contact with the giants of the brush. He listened eagerly to morsels of their dialogue, strained his vision to see them through the smoky, lamplit air; critical as he might have been, and was, before their work, the men themselves were shrouded in a vague splendor of achievement. They had all been hung.
There seemed a good deal of talk about a virulent article of comprehensive condemnation in the art columns of theSaturday Spectator; everybody seemed to have read it and nobody to have written it. For the rest, compliments crossed like smiling couples in the quadrille.
“What a stunning landscape that is of yours, Rapper!” said Wilfred Smith, a journalist so ignorant of painting that he was suspected of art criticism. “Quite like a Corot.”
“Oh, it’s nothing; just knocked off for a color-blind old Johnny who admires me,” replied Rapper, deprecatingly. He was a moon-faced man with a double eyeglass on a gold cord. “It’s rotten, really; I’m awfully ashamed of it.” And he elbowed his way towards it.
“So he ought to be, and so ought you to be ashamed, Wilfred,” said Morrison, the poet of pessimism and music-halls. “It’s just like those splashes of silvery gray they sell for Corots on the Boulevards.”
“That’s what I meant,” said Wilfred. “Didn’t you see I was guying him? Hullo, Clinch, I’ve been admiring that water-color of yours. What an exquisite face the girl has!”
“It isn’t a water-color, you —— fool; it’s a pastel,” said Clinch, gruffly.
“That’s what I meant—not an oil-color,” replied Wilfred, unabashed.
Matt stared with interest at the picture, which was just beside him. The face was indeed exquisite with the peculiar delicacy of pastel. He looked at the painter’s own face, coarse and splotched, the teeth fouled by endless tobacco. It was as though Pan should paint Psyche.
“I see theSaturday Spectatordoesn’t understand your ‘Carolina,’ Clinch,” said the poet, smiling.
Clinch damned theSaturday Spectatorin a string of unlovely oaths, which were drowned by the music of a violin and a piano. He did not care a twopenny damn what people scribbled about him; his pictures were there, just the same.
“But what does ‘Carolina’ mean, old man?” said the poet, appealingly.
Clinch replied that literary fellows were invariably sanguinary fools who fancied that painting meant things and could be explained in words. He had just been reading about the significance of Leonardo’s backgrounds in some rotten book on the Renaissance. In reality those bits of landscape must have been put in and painted out a dozen times before Leonardo had struckthe color-harmony he tried after. Morrison retorted, that if the art-critic could paint he would become a partisan, tied to his own talent. As it was, he could approach other men’s pictures without prejudice.
“But also without knowledge,” Clinch replied, goaded. He pointed out brutally that to learn painting meant to learn a new set of symbols. “If you wanted to paint that lamp,” he said, “you’d probably put down a—— line to get that edge, and so lose all the—— softness. A real line wouldn’t look a—— bit like the real thing. Same with color; real red wouldn’t give red. Painting is all subterfuge, optical illusion. Color and form are only an affair of relations.”
He went on to explain, with punctilious profanities, that to study the relation of that lamp to the piano-lid was enough for a picture; treated perfectly, there would be a poetry and mystery about it. Beauty, too, was only an affair of relations, and in “Carolina” he had been trying to get a beautiful relation between two ugly things, and an early Georgian feeling into a nineteenth-century interior, with a scientific accuracy of tones known only to modern French art.
Matt listened eagerly, wincing a little at the livelier oaths, but conscious of piquant perspectives, of novel artistic vision, which, if not quite intelligible, was in refreshing contrast with Tarmigan’s old-fashioned orthodoxy.
“But you had the same woman in your picture of the ‘Salvation Lass,’ ” persisted the poet.
Clinch explained that if writing chaps knew what it was to hunt for a satisfactory model, they’d thank their stars they didn’t know a palette from a planchette. A “swell woman” that really expressed your idea you couldn’t get to sit for you, and if you could get her you couldn’t swear at her. Besides, it was his ambition to create a new type of feminine beauty, and impose her on his period—une femme de Clinch! Wilfred Smith took mental notes, prepared henceforward to expound Clinch to an ignorant world.
“It’s about time he got a new model, anyway,” he said, when the repulsive-looking artist had moved off.
“Or painted her,” added Morrison, dryly.
Matt had a flash of resentment. The picture was to him a dainty dream of cool color and graceful form. Despite his association with Herbert, he did not yet understand the temperament that strides to Wit over Truth’s body.
“Isn’t it funny a man like that should draw such refined women?” he could not help remarking to his cicerone.
Matthew Strang assumed an oracular expression. “Art’s just a knack,” he said. “You’ve got to be born with it. I wasn’t, more’s the pity; but Herbert makes up for it, thank Heaven! Art’s got nothing to do with character. I’ve paid many a man to do me so many easel-pictures a year, and do you suppose I ever got them? The rogues get drunk or die or something, but they never come up to time.”
Matt was puzzled. If Art demanded anything, it seemed to him it was steadfastness and sobriety. The truth about it seemed to lie in those lines he had read in a volume of Matthew Arnold, borrowed from Herbert: