Dearest Eleanor,—Forgive me that I must cause you pain. I can only hope it will prove to have saved you greater pain in the future. But, my dear, I must not pretend it is from any unselfish desire to save you from sacrificing yourself to my happiness, as you in your generous nobility have been ready to do, that I have resolved never to see you again. I am leaving Paris at once. When I tell you the reason I know that it will ease your pain, and that your noble nature will approve and forgive. I am going back to my wife. I have thought it over and see that I have no option. I have been forgetting that in return for her helping me to Art, I vowed to love, cherish, and protect her. If I cannot love her—if I can only love you, if the thought of you will always be like music to me, though I must never see you again in the flesh—I must at least do my best to make her happy. This is not only a farewell to you, it is a farewell to Art. Without you to inspire it, my Art is dead. I retire from the long contest broken-hearted.Yours so truly,Matthew Strang.P.S.—I dared not trust myself to come and tell you this. It would have been a useless trial for both of us. You will be happier without me and all the suffering my selfish passion must have brought upon you. Forget me. God bless you.
Dearest Eleanor,—Forgive me that I must cause you pain. I can only hope it will prove to have saved you greater pain in the future. But, my dear, I must not pretend it is from any unselfish desire to save you from sacrificing yourself to my happiness, as you in your generous nobility have been ready to do, that I have resolved never to see you again. I am leaving Paris at once. When I tell you the reason I know that it will ease your pain, and that your noble nature will approve and forgive. I am going back to my wife. I have thought it over and see that I have no option. I have been forgetting that in return for her helping me to Art, I vowed to love, cherish, and protect her. If I cannot love her—if I can only love you, if the thought of you will always be like music to me, though I must never see you again in the flesh—I must at least do my best to make her happy. This is not only a farewell to you, it is a farewell to Art. Without you to inspire it, my Art is dead. I retire from the long contest broken-hearted.
Yours so truly,
Matthew Strang.
P.S.—I dared not trust myself to come and tell you this. It would have been a useless trial for both of us. You will be happier without me and all the suffering my selfish passion must have brought upon you. Forget me. God bless you.
He descended to the court-yard and dropped the letter into the box. Then he sat outside on his balcony and watched the great gleaming Boulevards as they woke to the new day.
He was too early at the station, and the train tarried. The porters leisurely wheeled in the luggage. Sleepy passengers straggled up, armed with gayly illustrated papers broad with Gallic buffoonery.
Oh, the agony of that last quarter of an hour, when Paris beckoned him with its finger of morning sunlight, when Art cried to him from a thousand happy ateliers, calling him to come back and be happy in the great work he felt he had been about to do at last; when Love shone like a purple haze veiling the world in poetic dream, and sang to him like an angel’s voice, and witched him back with the eyes and the hair and the lips of Eleanor Wyndwood!
But the train was going at last, and he must take his seat in his first-class compartment. It was his second defeat, his second farewell to Art, bitterer, crueller by a thousand-fold than the first, when he had sailed home again penniless, broken in soul and body. Then, at least, home was a tender recollection. Now—! And he had been so near the goal of happiness, the cup had been at his very lips. Never to be happy—never, never! The sudden shriek of the engine sounded sardonic. The train moved on, bearing Matthew Strang from all the sweetness and savor of life. In the great ocean of existence wherein men struggle for happiness he had gone down—like his father.
But, like his father, he had gone down wrapped in his flag.
The stage of the world is not adapted for heroic attitudes, unless the curtain be dropped on the instant.
To pass, after a tedious day-long journey, from the vivid boulevards to the gray dreariness of a poor London suburb on a Sunday evening was already a chill to the artistic mind; to find that the wife into whose arms he had come to fall in dramaticcontrition was not only out, but gone to church with Aunt Clara and little Clara, was to be further reminded of the essentially inartistic character of life in general, and of its especial narrowness in church-going districts.
But he stooped down to kiss little Davie, who, by reason of the servant’s “Sunday out,†had opened the door and explained these things to him. He saw that the child had a little wooden mannikin in his hand, and was sucking it.
“Don’t suck that, Davie,†he said.
“There ain’t no paint to spoil,†Davie urged, gravely. “It’s all gone.â€
Matthew carried both the little men down-stairs on his shoulder. In the kitchen he found Billy moping by the fire—profiting by the absence of the servant to enjoy the only fire Rosina’s economy permitted at this season of the year—but sunk so deep in a black reverie that he did not raise his head at the unwonted footsteps.
A wave of protective love, almost paternal, flooded Matthew’s soul; he laid his hand on poor Billy’s head as in benediction. Nevermore would they be parted, nevermore.
“Billy,†he said, softly.
The young man started violently, and looked up.
“I’ve come back, Billy,†he said, tenderly.
“So I see,†replied Billy, ungraciously.
He was stung to the quick, but he controlled his pain; he saw this was part of his atonement.
“I’ve come to make it up with Rosina. I’m not going away again,†he went on gently, his hand on Billy’s shoulder.
“And what’s the use of that?†Billy snapped. “Even if she makes it up with you, she’ll break out again in a few days. I know her.â€
He set down the child with a sigh, and drew a chair to his brother’s side. Davie climbed trustfully on his knee. The kettle was singing, and a plump gray cat purred in the fender.
“Besides,†Billy went on, “you’ve always said you couldn’t live here—it was necessary to live at your studio.â€
“I know; but I am giving up the studio.â€
Billy turned whiter than usual.
“What’s happened?†he cried in alarm.
“Nothing in particular.â€
“Then I suppose you are going to turn me out of my workroom?â€
“No, no, Billy. I am giving up painting altogether.â€
Billy’s eyes dilated in horror, as on the night when his mother had dragged him out of bed to trudge the frozen fields.
“Are you mad?†he gasped.
Something of his awe sent a shiver through his brother.
“Perhaps I am,†said Matthew.
He fell silent.
Billy regarded him furtively. The minutes dragged on. Matthew looked at his watch—getting on for seven. Eleanor Wyndwood would have been dressing for him—he saw her matchless loveliness. Another few minutes, and his kisses would have been on her lips—those lips that had lain on his in what was already an enchanted, hazy dream rather than a waking memory.
“Perhaps Iammad,†he muttered again, as he sat waiting for Rosina instead. And then he caught sight of the little figure Davie was sucking, and began to laugh boisterously.
Billy was terrified.
“You can have the studio back if you like,†he said, soothingly; the cripple’s tones became protective in their turn. “I can write anywhere—and, after all, what’s the use of my writing?—nobody will take what I write.â€
“I can write kisses,†interposed Davie, looking up proudly.
“What does he mean, Billy?†said Matthew.
“Oh, he used to put crosses at the end of the letter when Rosina wrote to poor old Coble—kisses to his grandfather, you know.â€
“He’s a angel now,†said Davie, gravely.
“What’s that you’re sucking?†Billy responded, sternly. “You know you mustn’t.â€
He took it away, and Davie set up a howl till pacified by a penny.
“It’s an image of a preacher, Matt,†Billy explained. “I forget his name. He died last year—Rosina used to go andhear him. She said he gave her great comfort. These images are sold in thousands. What a ludicrous thing popular religion is!â€
Matthew laughed, but there was a tear for Rosina in the laughter.
“By-the-way,†he said, suddenly, “did old Coble leave her any money?â€
“Yes—but a few thousand dollars was all there was when his estate was wound up. He couldn’t have expected to crack up, for he made no provision whatever for Aunt Clara.â€
“Then Rosina is keeping her?â€
“Yes, I suppose so.â€
“How does she reconcile that with her economy?†he thought, with an added throb of tenderness. The kettle sang on; the cat purred; he had a flash of hope—he might grow to love her yet. But he thought of Eleanor Wyndwood, and the hope died. They would have been on their way now to their restaurant—sitting close together, driving through the flashing streets. Oh, was he not mad to be here?
“What are you doing all alone?†he thought. “My love, my first love and my last, you who believed in me, who were ready to sacrifice yourself to me?â€
“Did you go to see Ruth Hailey?†asked Billy, suddenly.
Eleanor’s face vanished. He put his hand to his breast-pocket, and drew out the portrait with the sweet, shy eyes.
“Yes,†he said, tremulously, “and she gave me this.â€
Billy took the photograph and kissed it.
“God bless you!†he said.
Davie pricked up his ears.
“You’re not in love with her?†Matthew asked, lightly, with a sudden apprehension.
“I?—I know better than to be in love with any woman,†said Billy, sadly, as he returned the portrait. “Only in my stories can I love and be loved.â€
“It was she who sent us that mysterious money,†said Matthew, and told him the story. Billy listened in surprise and emotion.
“God bless you, Ruth!†he said again.
“What is that God?†interrupted Davie.
The brothers looked at each other, embarrassed.
“Ask mummy; she’ll tell you,†said Matthew, at last.
“Mummy did tell me, but I can’t ’derstand.†He sat there wondering. “When does God sleep?â€
The sudden blare and boom of a Salvationist procession saved reply. The blatant clangor passed, died. They waited for Rosina.
Presently they heard the returning church party descending into the area, so as not to soil the white upper-steps. He had kissed her before she was aware of his presence, as she stepped across the kitchen threshold, red-edged prayer-book in hand. After that her sullenness was only half-hearted. He said he had come to supper. By the time they had sat down to it a reconciliation had been patched up. Warned by Billy’s reception of his determination, he did not even break it to her yet. Thus tamely passed off the great renunciation scene—the crisis of his life—like everything else in his life, unlike what he had imagined beforehand. Rosina did not even understand what this home-coming meant to him. He pleaded that Davie, who did not want to go to sleep, should be allowed to stay up to supper, but this request was not granted.
“Mummy, when does God go to sleep?†the persistent Davie remembered to ask as she was leading him from the room.
“God never sleeps,†replied Rosina, sternly, and haled him to bed.
Matthew pondered the immense saying, so glibly spoken, as he waited for her to return. “Aunt Clara,†pouch-eyed and wan, her head nodding queerly with excitement at the great man’s presence, was laying the supper in the warm kitchen, where the servant would not resume possession till ten; little Clara was at her task of Bible reading. Billy drowsed on his chair, exhausted. The fire glowed red; the cat was still stretched in the warmth. Something in the scene thrilled him with a sense of restful kinship with it, half sweet, half sad; a sense of being more really at home than in delicate drawing-rooms; the old homely kitchen far away on the borders of theforest sent out subtle links, binding his childhood to the manhood that had come at last.
This half-and-half-ness was typical of the new life which began that night, and which on the morrow was sealed and consecrated by the characteristically self-deceptive message from Eleanor: “You are right. We have chosen the highest.†It was a life full of petty pricks and every-day worries. But if it was not so grandiosely heroic as he had intended, neither was the consequence to his Art as he had foreseen.
He has not given up Art. Neither Rosina nor Billy would permit that folly, and Eleanor’s brief letter had a postscript of inspiring protest. He had meant to sacrifice Art and Happiness, but only the latter sacrifice was accepted. For unhappiness drove him back to his studio—where the “Angelus†hung now like an inspiration. From the glooms and trials of the daily routine in this prosaic home, with its faithful but narrow-souled mistress, who knew not what was passing in her husband’s mind, nor at what cost he had made her happy, and who would not even agree to live in some beautiful country spot which would have softened life for him—from this depressing household, with its unsprightly children, its cheerless pensioner, its querulous cripple resenting the very hand that fed him, he escaped to the little whitewashed studio to find in his Art oblivion of the burden of life.
And now, at last, his true life—work was begun. Removed from the sapping cynicism of the Club conscience, from the drought of drawing-room disbelief, from the miasma of fashionable conversation, from the confusing cackle of critics; saved from the intrigue with Mrs. Wyndwood, that would have distracted his soul and imposed an extra need for money-making; withdrawn from the feverish rush of fashion and the enervating consumption of superfluous food and drink; exempted from keeping up a luxurious position purchased by scamped, soulless pictures; able to work without the whims of sitters or patrons, without regard to prices—for Rosina’s income, augmented by her very considerable hoardings and by his balance, supplemented by the proceeds of the sale of his studio effects and
“SOMETHING IN THE SCENE THRILLED HIM WITH A SENSE OF RESTFUL KINSHIPâ€â€œSOMETHING IN THE SCENE THRILLED HIM WITH A SENSE OF RESTFUL KINSHIPâ€
ancient pictures, the whole doubled by Rosina’s economic administration, was amply sufficient for every rational need—Matthew Strang began at last, without underthought of anything but Art, in this homely environment to which his soul was native, to express his own inmost individuality, to produce faithfully and finely the work it was in him to do.
Solitary, silent, sorrowful, strong; not chattering about his ideas and his aims, indifferent to fame or the voice of posterity, striving for self-approbation and rarely obtaining it, touching and retouching, breaking the rules of the schools in obedience to his own genius, he toiled on in his humble studio, seeking the highest, with no man and no woman to inspire, encourage, or praise. He had been saved from Love and Happiness, and sent back into sympathy with all that works and suffers. And thus the note that had trembled faintly and then died out in his work was struck strong and sure at last—the note of soul. To his accurate science and his genius for the decorative, which are two of the factors of great Art, was now added the spiritual poetry which is the last and rarest. For he was master of his soul at last.
He had absorbed life sufficiently—he had toiled and hungered; he had feasted and made merry; he had sorrowed and endured; he had sinned and suffered; he had known the lust of life and the pride of the eye; he had known Love—the love of the soul and the love of the senses; he had known the heartache of baffled ambition and the dust and ashes of achievement. What he had wanted he had not got; by the time he had got it he had not wanted it; whatever he had set out to do he had not done, and whatever he had done he had not foreseen. And out of all this travail of the soul was born his Art—strong, austere, simple.
In the five or six years since he died to the world he has finished as many big pictures, and has made studies for others, besides a host of minor things. He has not exhibited any of the larger pictures in the Academy; three have been presented quietly to provincial and suburban galleries where the People comes. Only one with some of the smaller things has been sold for money, and this but to appease Rosina; it was one moresacrifice of his individuality to hers. It is true there are expenses for models and materials, and he has now two more children, but it jars upon him to ask money for work that expresses and conceals the tragic secrets of his inmost being. Nor does he care to have his pictures shut away amid the other furniture of luxurious mansions. Still, he has learned enough to know that life cannot be lived ideally. And, moreover, the event has taught him again the contrariety of life; for his eccentricity, leaking out slowly, has enhanced the fame to which he is indifferent, and, aided by a legend of mysterious saturnine seclusion, has raised his market value to such a point that he need only sell an occasional picture. One dealer in particular is anxious to give him his own price for a picture. Matthew Strang will probably part with one to him some day, but he does not know that the dealer is acting for Lady Thornton, the wealthy and celebrated society leader and convert, though he knows and is glad that Eleanor Wyndwood found both happiness and spiritual peace when, a few months after her friend Olive Regan’s marriage to Herbert Strang, that ever-charming and impressionable lady was led to the altar by the handsome and brilliant Sir Gilbert Thornton, and went over with him to Roman Catholicism. With the same earnestness with which she had passed from her native orthodoxy to the Socialism of Gerard Brode, and thence to the spirituality of Dolkovitch, she had slid by a natural transition from the sensuous art atmosphere of Matthew Strang’s world into the sensuous spirituality of Catholicism as soon as his influence had been replaced by the ascendency of another male mind. He was not asked to the wedding, and the invitation to Olive’s, reaching him in the days when the first darkness of isolation was upon him, he had left unanswered.
And just as he has given his Art freely to the world, so, under the inspiration of Tarmigan’s memory, he gives his services freely at Grainger’s and other humble art-schools as encourager of every talent that aspires under discouragement; teaching it to be itself and nothing else, for the artist gives to the world and is not asked for, creating the taste he satisfies, and Art is not Truth nor Beauty, but a revelation of beautiful truth through the individual vision. It is the artist’s reaction to the stimulus of his universe,whether his universe be our common world seen for itself or through antecedent art, or a private world of inward vision: for while the philosophers are quarrelling about abstract truth, the artist answers Pilate’s question through his own personality. The beauty which Matthew Strang’s art reveals, though he experiments in many styles, with unequal results, is mainly tragic. For others the gay, the flippant, the bright—let those from whose temperament these things flow interpret the joyousness and buoyancy and airy grace of existence. For others the empty experimentation in line and color. It is all Art—in the house of Art are many mansions. He has come to the last of the three stages of so many artists, who pass from the fever to do everything, through a period of intolerance for all they cannot do, into a genial acceptance of the good in all schools. But, unassuming as he has always been, he is yet sometimes shaken by righteous indignation when he sees tawdry art—art that is the response to the stimulus of no universe but the artificial studio-universe of models and posings and stage-properties—enthroned and fêted at the banquet of life; and sometimes an unguarded word flashes out before his pupils, but he always repents of his railings, feeling it is his to work, not to judge; to do the one simple thing that his hand findeth to do.
One of his pictures is of a woman looking out to sea with hopeless eyes; there is a mocking glory of sunset in the sky. This is called “The Pain of the World.†The title was due to Olive’s exclamation that night in Devonshire. The figure is his mother’s, come back to him in his own solitude—the image of her standing thus in the asylum at Halifax could not be effaced from his soul; it had to find expression in his Art.
As he worked at it, with the brutal aloofness of the artist, studying lights and shadows, values and effects, gradations and tones, he wondered whether the artist were a cold-blooded monster, or a divinely appointed alchemist sent to transmute the dross of the world’s pain to the gold of Art for the world’s pleasure; a magician to cover up the rawness of life, as kindly Nature covers up the naked earth with grass, or throws the purple light of dream over all that is dead—over the centuries that are past or our youth that is gone; a Redeemer, whose beautiful perceptionof pathos and tragedy robs the grave of its victory, and plucks Death of its sting, so that no man suffereth or travaileth without contributing to the raw stuff of life of which Art is woven by the souls dowered with the pangs and privileges of Over-Consciousness. Each man, it sometimes seemed to him, dimly, had to pay so much in sorrow and pain; and in return for that he drew from the common human fund the comprehension of life and the consolation of Art, new sympathies and new delights, music and books and pictures, that only lived through the rich variety of human destinies; mystic atmospheres and minor scales, meaningless to souls that had not suffered or inherited the capacity to suffer. Some—generally the stupid—paid little in pain and sorrow; and some—as in his own case—much. But so long as the account showed a balance to the general good, it was not for the soul that was sacrificed to complain. It was, perhaps, even a privilege to subserve the common good. Life was so arranged that virtue could not be sure of personal reward, and this uncertainty was just what made virtue possible. Under no other scheme of things could the soul enjoy the privilege of virtue. To have suffered, as he himself had done, by the institution of marriage, both as child and husband; to have been a victim to the general laws which safeguard human society; to have been cut in two by the flaming swords of the cherubim, which turn every way to keep the way of the Tree of Life—all this did not, he thought, give him the right to blaspheme existence. And the artist at least extracted a soul of good from all things evil.
Some such reflections—not clear, but all confused and blurred, for he was no syllogism-building philosopher, but an artist whose profoundest thought sprang always from the concrete image before him—came to him again when he was working at his famous picture “The Persecutors,†inspired by an episode in Billy’s life, though Billy does not know. It is simply children tormenting an old man. The old man is one of the world’s wrecks; the children know not what they do. But the pathos of the picture is overwhelming; it purifies by pity and terror. This is the profit to the world of Billy’s life.
Matthew Strang knows, with the same secret assurance that sent him out to fight, and strengthened him in the long struggle, that this picture will live, that the gods have answered his boyish prayer for immortality. But at moments when Billy is moping or in pain, or when the artist foresees the gabble of magazines and drawing-rooms about his work, the chatter of fashionable parrots, and the analysis of his “second manner†by glib, comfortable critics, he wonders whether the picture or the immortality is worth the price.
But, stronger than those driven by their Over-Consciousness to express in artistic shapes the futility of life, he does not dwell eternally on the tears of things; and his picture simply entitled “A Woman†is perhaps his masterpiece. For when he painted it that sunrise in Paris was still vivid to him, and the light in Ruth Hailey’s eyes, and that fire of love in Eleanor Wyndwood’s; these things were in the eternal order, too, as truly as the ugliness and the sordid realities. The simplest human life was packed with marvels of sensation and emotion, haloed with dreams and divine illusions. To have been a child, to have sung and danced, to have eaten and played, to have seen woods and waters, to have grown to youth and to manhood, to have dreamed and aspired, to have labored and hoped—all this happiness had been his while he was looking for happiness, just as Art had been his in Nova Scotia, while he had been struggling to get to it in England.
And so to-day he yearns to paint the poetry of the Real—not with the false romantic glamour which had witched his youth, though even his youth had had a hankering after the Real, just as his maturity retains a love for the mystic. That gilded unreality to which his Art would have gravitated, had he found happiness with the sentimental Eleanor in her atmosphere of fashion, will be replaced by the beauty that even when mystic is based on Truth. He needed no woman’s inspiration, nor the stimulus of cultured cliques. Alone he faces the realities of life and death without intervening veils of charming illusion, no longer craving to filter the honest sunlight through stained cathedral windows or to tarnish the simplicity of the grave with monumental angels. Aspiring now to paint London, he wandersthrough the gray streets, as in his days of hunger, but now the grotesque figures no longer seem outside the realm of serious Art, or mere picturesque arrangements of line and color. To his purged vision, that still lacks humor, they touch the mysteries and the infinities, passing and disappearing like ghosts on a planet of dream: solitude has brought him a sense of the universal life from which they flow, and he fancies the function of Art should be to show the whole in every part, the universal through the particular. And so he longs to paint the beauty that lies unseen of grosser eyes, the poetry of mean streets and every-day figures, to enrich and hallow life by revealing some sweep of a great principle that purifies and atones.
In “The Old Maid†he has painted the portrait of “Aunt Clara†with Davie on her knee, revealing the wistful, imprisoned, maternal instinct he detected one day in her sunken eyes as she fondled his little Davie. What makes this presentation of ugliness Art is not merely the breathing brush-work, but the beauty of his own pity which the artist has added to the Nature he copied. With the falsely aristocratic in Art or life he has lost sympathy: to him to be honest and faithful is to belong to the only aristocracy in the world—and the smallest. Sometimes he dreams of some great Common Art—for all men, like the sky and the air, which should somehow soften life for all. And dreaming thus he somewhat frets against the many limitations of his own Art—as once in his callow boyhood when he set out to write that dime novel—and against its lapsed influence in modern life, wishing rather he had been a great poet or a great musician. Only music and poetry, he feared while toiling at the “Old Maid,†could express and inspire modern life; the impulse that had raised the cathedral had been transformed into the impulse that built the grand hotel, fitted throughout with electrical conveniences; in the visible arts landscape and portraiture alone seemed to find response from the modern mind, the one by its revelation of the beauty of the world, the other by its increasing subtlety of psychological insight. Painting had begun with religion, religion had led to technique, then religion had drifted away from painting, and then technique had become a religion. But technique ought not to be thought of separately except bythe student; to the artist the spiritual and the material came as one conception, as metre comes with the poet’s thought. The spirit must be brought back to painting—this modern accuracy of tones and forms was but the channel for it. But it could no longer be conveyed through the simple images of a popular creed to which all men vibrated: to-day there was no such common chord for the artist to touch. Even this picture of “The Old Maid†might be unintelligible without its title, and risked denunciation as literary. And the greatest picture could be seen by but few.
But repining is useless; there is only one thing he can do, and he must do it—a small thing in the span of the cosmos and the sweep of the ages, but to be done ere he goes down to the kindred dust. But before death comes he has doubtless other things to suffer—all these spiritual agonies have seared the body in which early privations and sickness had already left the seeds of premature infirmity. His children are growing up, too, bringing new fears and problems.
And yet his life is not all unhappy—work is his anodyne, and there is an inner peace in the daily pain, because it is the pain that his soul has chosen, in willing slavery to its own yoke.
But life is too long for ideals; the unending procession of the days depresses the finest enthusiasm. Sometimes when the domestic horizon is dark, or when his body is racked with pain, he rebels against the rôle thrust upon him in the world’s workshop, and against the fate that mocked at his free-will, and made of him a voluntary instrument for the happiness of Rosina and Herbert, turning his every action to undreamed-of issues; and then he longs for the life that he had found so hollow, the life of gay talk, and rustling dresses, and wine, and woman, and song. And in such moments as these—when the natural human instinct for happiness, yearning sunward, breaks through all the strata of laborious philosophy and experience—he remembers that men call him “The Master,†and then he seems to hear the sardonic laughter of Mad Peggy, as he asks himself what Master he has followed in his sacrifice, or what Master, working imperturbably, moulds human life at his ironic, inscrutable will.