CHAPTER V
That evening after dinner I deliberately tempted the Providence which had offered me Fifine as a mild mental stimulant. There were several of my paintings hanging on the walls of the sitting-room, and, when I followed her in thither, I found her standing meditatively, cigarette in hand, before one of them. I came and stood behind her.
“Ah!” I said, “that is one of the things in which I successfully hid from you what my choice of your dress revealed.”
She turned and looked me quite frankly and coolly in the face.
“What is it all about?” she said.
“Call it,” I answered, “a psychologic exercise in paint.”
“Then it is not a picture?”
“O! yes it is—or at least I hope so.”
“But—” she shook her head—“I do not understand. A picture is a picture, and a sum is a sum, and a psychologic exercise is a psychologic exercise.”
“You mean they are not assimilable terms. What, then, is your definition of a picture?”
She considered, drawing thoughtfully at her cigarette.
“I think,” she said presently, “it is art—just that.”
“Well, what is art?”
Again she considered, and answered, “Form.”
“Form is an elusive term,” I said, “impossible of hard and fast definition. There is no way of proving that any two of us agree about it—no way of ascertaining that our mental and material optics come to the same conclusion with regard to it.”
“Then why should you expect people to take your view of it, in—in a thing like this?”
“I don’t—in a thing like this. I merely utter my protest in the thing against the accepted conventions of form. It is an impression, conveyed and caught through atmospheric vibration, of what form actually suggested, at that particular moment, in that particular instance, to my individual temperament.”
“I think,” she said calmly, after a pause, “that that is nonsense.”
“What,” I demanded, astonished, “is nonsense?”
“All that talk about impressions and individual temperaments. It is only an excuse for idleness—for trying the short cut to laborious ends. It is so much easier to spend an hour over a picture—over a canvas—than a month. A burglar might claim just the same excuse for stealing a year’s income in a night, instead of earning it in a year. Besides, if your temperament is individual, what is the good of trying to impose it on people who have individual temperaments of their own. You can’t expect them to understand you; so what is the good?”
“None,” I said briefly—and grimly. This “mild mental stimulant” was beginning to reveal itself a headier posset than I had ever dreamed it to be.
“Then,” she answered, “why do you protest? You know you said you did.”
“As a revolutionist, I am bound to,” I replied weakly.
“A revolutionist from what?”
“From stereotype and standards. Standards are for yard measures, and bushel measures, and other such commercial or scientific essentials. They are not for art.”
“Why not?”
“O, Cousin! See to what they have led us—the lifeless petrifactions of the schools and academies.”
“Well, they are art, if they are bad art. And there will always be bad art and bad artists. But you want to lead us away from art altogether—into psychologic exercises—impressions that only you can understand. Do you paint for yourself alone, then? In that case why do you complain of your lack of appreciation?”
“I don’t.”
“O, you do! I know it from Mademoiselle your sister. You are very humorous and philosophical, but you are hurt in your heart that the world will not comprehend you better. I have seen pictures by those who think like you—Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse—and I suppose, if they did not feel like you, that they would hardly exhibit in public galleries impressions which were just peculiar to themselves, and impossible of understanding by others differently constituted.”
Why should she not have seen them, these mutinous ones? Why, on the other hand, had I admitted this viper to my hearth?
“I, too, have exhibited in public galleries,” I said, “and found sympathy and understanding among the elect.”
“Well, who elected them?” she said—“themselves? There are always to be found inconsiderable people to applaud what they don’t understand. A little man blowing a big trumpet gets some of the credit for the noise, you see.”
“But they did understand.”
“They couldn’t, you know, if we all see with different eyes.”
“O, this is puerile!” I cried, with a little shrug and laugh. “You don’t like my pictures, or what I call pictures. Very well, then, you don’t.”
“I think they are stuff and nonsense,” she answered, turning away from the wall. “But I do like your little mother: she is a real darling.”
She was lying in a corner, unfinished—my little clay model of startled yet innocent maternity.
“O! you like that!” I said, a solacing glow about my heart.
“You needn’t sneer,” she answered. “Why didn’t your atmospheric vibrations make a shapeless jelly of her too?”
“That is different. You must allow for the medium.”
“I don’t. There should be only one rule in Art, I am sure. What applies to this applies to all; and it amounts in the end to form. Everyone with the right eyes knows what beauty of form means. You do yourself, you see; and yet you can go and paint those pictures.”
“O, for heaven’s sake leave my pictures alone!”
“You shouldn’t raise your voice. It squeaks and cracks when you do. I’m sure I’ll leave them alone with pleasure.” But she couldn’t. “I’m glad anyhow,” she said, “that I don’t see things, even for a moment, as if they were all made up of one huge nettlerash.”
Poor Pissarro, with his light analyses and colour vibrations! I was bound to feel very small; but I could not help sniggering over the impudent candour of this hussy. She turned, and dropped the butt of her cigarette into a brass pot, and went silently scrutinising the “things” along the walls. Presently she stopped before a little framed piece, an interior with figures, very rich and sombre in tone, but made cloudier than its due by the dirty state of the glass.
“O, I like that!” she said—“I do like that. I think you must be an artist after all. Why do you not always paint in that way?”
“Every producer, you know, has his own best for enemy. What do you find in this to like so much?”
“It is a picture—a little bit of truth and beauty brought into the limits of the eye’s understanding. It seems to satisfy everything—one’s love of colour, one’s sense of form, and—yes, just the little place in one’s emotions the two appeal to. It doesn’t matter a bit about the subject. It is the scheme of colour which is the subject, and the figures are only patterns in it.” She turned on me. “O, you are stupid, to go and paint those other things when you can do like this!”
“Well, I can’t,” I said. “As a matter of fact it is by a friend of mine. It is very good, as you say; but the critics would have none of it.”
“The critics!” she snapped her rosy fingers disdainfully. “They are just the flies on that glass, that have made it all dirty and obscure. But the picture is behind all the time to speak for itself; and some day posterity will clean away the dirt with a wet sponge, and the truth will come out. I should like to know the man who painted it.”
“Sorry,” I said shortly. “He’s dead.”
Something in my tone seemed to strike her. Her eyes were on me, and suddenly a strange light, like wistfulness or pity, came into them.
“I am sorry if I hurt you,” she said. “I did not know—how could I? And I am sure, after seeing that dear little mother, you could paint pictures like this if you would.”
“Would you like me to?” I said. I don’t know what made me say it. This young callow criticism, refreshing as it might be, was hardly worth the most transitory waiving of my principles. Yet oddly there came into my mind the face, hectic and eager, of the boy Ronsin, whose work, and gift to me, the picture had been—and I was jealous. Yes, absurd as it may sound, because she had said she would like to know him, I was jealous. For my art, or what else? Ah, that I cannot tell. Yet at least I could not deny that, whatever the youthfulness of this criticism, it had seen clearly here: the picture was, of its kind, remarkably good.
“Of course I should,” she answered. “You admitted yourself, you know, that it was a fine work.”
“It is a fine work,” I said, “and I am not so dogmatic as to profess that there is only one right theory of art in the world. But every fox looks after his own skin, says the proverb; and dislikes, adds I, the having it flayed from him to adorn a rival.”
And so ended our first disputation—which was by no means our last—on the subject. If I was heckled and browbeaten, it was also agreeably clear to me that I had got no fool for my housemate.
Fifine, come out of her shell of apathy, was a surprise indeed.