CHAPTER IV
“Weare prominent members of the Art Endeavour Circle,” Miss Parker wrote Thornton Jennings, after a month in the Villa Rosadina. “I may say that we have a salon for the young Genius. Erard has surrounded us with a lot of little Erards. There is Salters. He is a distinguished-looking young American with an easy income and leanings towards art. He copies Erard, picks up his ideas from the one source of pure criticism—at least Erard says so,—and then dilutes them. Even if Mr. Salters is a little ‘short’ of ideas, he is very nice and entertaining.
“To pass over a shabby artist who has quarrelled with his wife and can’t sell his pictures, and the Gorgon (she’s Vivian Vavasour and is as sour as her articles are sweetly wordy), we come to Mary Eleanor Bradley, the last enrolment. She is a young woman, rather portly, with a puffy face and flaxen hair, who speaks very intensely and slowly and talks all the time. She comes from a good family in Philadelphia and has been in some college or other. She made up her mind that the only way to see Europe was to come over alone and ‘be Bohemian.’ But she hasn’t found it much fun so far; she is trying desperately to hook on to our procession. Erard says nay. Her great feat was a tour in Lombardy with Erard,sanschaperone,for six days. Mr. Erard says she asked him, and he couldn’t refuse a lady. Then, horrid man! he smiles and says no man needs a chaperone with Miss Bradley except for self-protection.Shesays it was quite romantic, and ‘you couldn’t do it with a man—well, who was in good society.’ She talks a lot about it; the excursion makes her reputation in the Art Endeavour Circle.
“This Miss Bradley isn’t half so bad as she sounds. I believe she is nice enough when she is kept under restraint. She treats me as an amiable simpleton, and we get on splendidly. If she escapes soon enough from the Circle she will probably settle down and marry some nice little man who won’t let her cross the street alone after five in the evening.
“Besides these parasites who drink tea and take up our time in this dear Florence, Erard brings us better material sometimes—young French poets and journalists, a Jew critic on a London paper—cosmopolitan celebrities just budding. I have almost forgotten little Mr. Anthon, Adela’s younger brother. He came on from Paris last week. He doesn’t approve of Adela and thinks I should lecture her.
“He doesn’t know that I am tolerated only on my good behaviour and non-interference. Erard is master now. We came here to be awfully free and do as we liked, but we have to work hard at drawing and reading and taking notes for the master. You ought to see your regal Mrs. Wilbur getting up at eight every morning in order to finish her tasks and have some time for the galleries. Erard has a most useful assistant, allfor nothing. For, you know, it isn’t painting now,—that is cheap, but it’s ideas about painting—‘prehensile values,’ the ‘folly of humanism,’ the ‘receptivity of the sensorium,’ and the ‘psychology of colour.’ We are engaged in dissecting art and in stewing the remains up into little dishes. One big dish the cooks are busy over now, and they are planning to go to Rome to put in the flavouring. I must be good, or I shan’t be invited. For they go off ‘for business’ quite by themselves, and aren’t bothered by conventionalities. They got ’way beyond what people say or think,—long ago.
“Sometimes it is dreary enough, this talk; it sounds like so much gibberish. Last Sunday they invited me to go to Prato with them, out of pure kindness. Erard got started on ‘the critic’s function,’ and we listened. He said that well-informed people all thought alike on art, and the real judges (those who had cultivated their sensoriums and had good sensoriums) always agreed about any object of art. Then when we came out atop of a hill before a lovely valley with a road winding through it, he began to experiment on us. He asked uswherewefeltthe road. I said in my eyes, but Mrs. Wilbur gave the correct answer,—in the muscles of the forearm; then, as it mounted the hills beyond, in the muscles of the legs. They tightened up sympathetically when you looked hard enough. ‘Now,’ Mr. Erard said, ‘that’s the way the artist makes you feel when you see the road he paints.’ Some one told me that the psychology business Erard picked up from Prudler, the young psychologist at Bonn, whom he met in Switzerland twoyears ago, just as the measuring toes and ears, and all that, was taken from an old Italian. I don’t know; they all seem much bothered about the original source of ideas. Erard accuses the Gorgon of living onhim, intellectually, and others say they both live on Symonds.
“Heigho! it’s a queer world, this,—but it is dreadfully like Chicago in some respects. I wonder where it will all end. This lovely Florence, how sweet it would be without the Art Endeavourers! My pals are old Luisa, our protecting house-saint, and thecontadinawho helps her, little Pinetta.”
Molly Parker’s jocular account of her friend’s doings was not exaggerated. Mrs. Wilbur had found the work suggested for her by Erard ready at hand and more and more engrossing. Whither it led she did not trouble herself about, any more than she speculated on the probable outcome of her present manner of life. Erard himself had come down to Italy when the winter was well on, and though he flitted up and down the peninsula on one errand or another, his centre of operations was Florence. There he had established himself, in a suite of rooms on the Piazza San Spirito, where the sun lay for long hours,—as usual, in the one completely suitable environment. Even Molly Parker could not find fault with his taking up his abode just there within a ten minutes’ rapid walk to the Villa Rosadina, nor with his frequent visits, which never seemed aimless. Yet she felt that his grasp on their actions grew firmer as the weeks passed: “we think Erard and feel Erard!”
A slight diversion was created by Walter Anthon’sarrival. His “serious news” to the effect that “heintends to apply for a divorce,” was received indifferently by his haughty sister. Young Walter had hoped to arrange diplomatically a “modus vivendi”; indeed the family had deputed him to bring his sister back to St. Louis. Mrs. Wilbur laughed at his solemnity. She even went so far as to say that it pleased her to know “Mr. Wilbur wishes a divorce. That means he has recovered from his blow, consoled himself. It has come so quickly that I doubt if he would be willing to make any other arrangements.” She had in mind the ample Mrs. Stevans. “If he has consoled himself he will get rid of me sooner or later. And it will be easier for him to get rid of me if I remain away. I can do that for him at least.” Nor would she be moved about her property. “I gave that to him long ago. I certainly hope he won’t give it up. He is right-minded and might have foolish scruples, but I shall do what I can to have him keep it.”
“The shocking scandal of it!” young Anthon moaned to Molly Parker. “Running off this way with Erard.”
“And with me, you forget. I hold the social smelling-salts.”
“Does she mean to marry him?”
“Perhaps Erard doesn’t believe in marriage. This arrangement saves him from any matrimonial monotony.”
“Can’t you take a stand, and bring her to her senses?”
“I am no good at evangelizing,” Miss Parker replied forlornly. “Adela must have a woman around to say commonplace things to when she’s on a strain. That’s all the good I am. She hasn’t had enough of the Erarddose yet. We’ll have to wait. There she goes now with the little Brown Rat.” They could see from the terrace where they were talking a cab rolling down the serpentine curves of the hill.
“Off to get a new sensation. Remember all your nagging is just fuel for the fire. She doesn’t, well, care for you, and anything you don’t want her to do must seem particularly nice.”
So the diplomat returned unsuccessful to his London rooms and advised the family to get what they could out of Wilbur without stirring Adela up.
Yet her brother’s news had affected her. Erard noted that she wasdifficilethat afternoon. They had driven over to Santa Croce to examine a bit of sculpture in one of the chapels. The chill of the church or her own meditations depressed Mrs. Wilbur. Then Erard’s cold little epigrams about art were irritating. The precious intoxication of that first long look on beauty had faded rapidly. Erard had taught her to be ashamed of such savage satisfaction; but groping after the masculine play of intellect was painful. Yet her career was marked out for her: she was to be “a discriminator of fine pleasures.” Moments of regret, however, and of disappointment as to-day, intervened, when even the most pitiful creative effort seemed greater than profound discernment. Erard scoffingly said that when she had these moods she was trying to see “the beyond.”
She left the church abruptly, preferring the placid sunny square where little children were playing, to the damp church and the high function of criticism. Shecould not send her companion away; so the two strolled aimlessly through the stone passages, echoing faintly with half-frozen life, out to the bright river bank. Even the brilliant sunshine of the February sky gave no comforting warmth. Erard said the sun appeared for the effect only. The Arno, too, flowed muddy and sullen, sweeping debris down from old mountain villages. The elements of royal splendour, to which she had once responded tremulously, lay before her eye, but she was not stirred. She thought.
Later, when they were drinking their tea in the villa, Mrs. Wilbur let fall the thoughts simmering in her mind. Erard was doctoring one of her architectural sketches, while she watched his skilful hand.
“A lot of your things seemed to me so promising,” she mused.
“‘Promising’—disgusting word,” Erard snapped. “Youth, a few years between puberty and manhood, is filled with deceptive lights, which are taken often for true fires. The period of physical eruption past, the lights fade from the mental horizon; the ambitious, imaginative youth, if he has anything in him, becomes a scholar or a dilettante.”
Mrs. Wilbur moved uncomfortably. What her woman’s soul hated to feel was that Erard’s specifically original and creative powers had never been great and were fated to decline steadily, growing each year more colourless. It was a slow, inevitable process which he was powerless to arrest.
“It’s childish to think there is any spiritual mysteryin the toy,” Erard continued. “The world, too, has grown from puberty to a staid maturity where it cares first for a fact. In hours of relaxation, it sighs for the dream of its unsettled years; but give it a poet and it laughs at his boyishness—until he is dead.”
“That is hateful,” she flung these words into the crackling fire which lighted the lofty room sombrely.
“Only because you invest the artist with a romantic halo,” Erard insisted. “I have found my work absorbing and fruitful. I have been successful in it, and am encouraged to prosecute my ideas and publish the results. It makes little difference by what wicket-gate we approach the field: the problems are the same. And the greatest note of our day iscreative criticism,” he rose authoritatively at these words,—a phrase which was frequently on his lips. “Your artist should be busy over his technique. So far as intellect goes, he is often a dumb beast.Wedeal with ideas. We extract the ideas, press out the sensations peculiar to his art, and we are officiating priests between him and the mob.”
Mrs. Wilbur remained silent, unappeased, and opening the piano she struck a few chords, drawing out a kind of sad, tinkling music.
Ah! there was a difference between great criticism and even puny art. If not in the usefulness of the work, in the man behind the imagined work, and the soul to whom he spoke! Therewasa halo about the creator of new notes of loveliness. She had been fired by the picture of a man struggling with adversity for the chanceto announce himself, thrusting himself with Napoleonic egotism towards his great work that should justify him and his disciples before the world. But—little textbooks on art, essays, reviews, even this book which was to make a sensation from Berlin to Chicago—that was hardly a justification. Others did as much without all this stress and strain. And even if not done, the world went on quite wise enough without a little more talk about European culture.
“Itisgreater to create than to comprehend,” she spoke out, above the tinkle of the old piano, urged by some reproach in her soul. “We are all blind, blind in this weary world, and we are groping for the gods who deny themselves to us. It isgreatto see beyond, to know the gods even faintly, and to appease the hunger of others. More than that it isman’sgreat act, the revealing of himself before the Master, his prayer to God who has made him with appetites and passions, and has made him with the longing to see and the power to dream. That has—” She paused, shrinking from completing her thought—“brought me here and made me low.”
She closed the piano, and walked rapidly up and down the room. Suddenly she lit a candle and motioned Erard to follow her into an adjoining lumber-room. He looked about disgustedly at the dusty room, the neglected canvases. In one corner stood an easel, and on it, unframed, his picture of Adela Anthon, which with coarse irony Wilbur had recently sent to her bankers. They looked at the face, Mrs. Wilbur holding the candle above their heads.
“I couldn’t do that now,” Erard admitted, squinting at the picture critically.
“No!” Mrs. Wilbur assented decisively. “Andthat,” she spoke fiercely, “the power behind that picture mastered me, deluded me—it is sad—defeat—”
A flare of wind blew out the light.
“You are wrong,” Erard checked her calmly, “and foolish. The power is still mine, and—”
He moved as if to touch her. She walked absently past him into the firelight, and placing the candle unlit on the table, sank into a chair.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she answered listlessly, burying her gaze again in the fire.
Erard watched her savouringly, exactly conscious of her beauty and her power. She was to behisin due and proper season. To-night she had stirred his sluggish senses, much as a superb actress might impose herself, at one remove.