V
It should be stated that Wynne Rendall showed small skill as a painter. He approached the task with a pleasant conviction that he would at least rival if not excel the ordinary run of students. At school he had been able to achieve clever little caricatures of masters and boys, and he had thought to draw from life would be a simpler matter altogether. To his chagrin he discovered that he was not able even to place the figure roughly upon a canvas. He realized the intention of the pose, but his efforts to convey it were futile and grotesque.
With jealous irritation he observed how the other students dashed in the rough constructive features of a figure with sure sense of proportion and animation.
“Wha’ are ye trying to do?” inquired a Scotch lad, who had abandoned his work for the pleasure of watching Wynne’s confusion. “Mon, it’s awfu’. Have ye no drawn from the antique?”
Wynne was not disposed to give himself away, although the words made him hot with shame.
“Every one has his own method,” he retorted.
“A’mitted, but there’s no meethod in yon. Stand awa’ a meenit.” And before Wynne had time to protest he struck a dozen red lines upon the canvas which gave an almost instantaneous likeness to the subject.
“Leave it alone,” said Wynne. “It isn’t yours.”
“I need hairdly say I’m glad. Now look ye here. Ye know naything, and a leetle ceevil attention will profit ye.”
He did not pay the slightest heed to Wynne’s sulky rejoinder, but, sucking at his pipe, continued to work on the canvas with great dexterity and skill. Presently he wearied of the occupation, and Wynne came back to his own with a somewhat chastened spirit.
It is an understood thing in the ateliers that every one criticizes every one else, and supports his theories by painting on the canvas he may be discussing. Before the day was out half a dozen different men left their mark on Wynne’s study. The most irritating feature about this practice was the coincidence that they always obliterated some little passage with which he was pleased. To quote one instance, he had succeeded rather happily in the treatment of an eye, imparting to it a sparkle and lustre that gave him profound satisfaction. He could have screamed with rage when the red-headed Alsatian, dipping his thumb in some raw umber, blotted it out, saying sweetly:
“It is not that it is an eye—it is a shadow that it should be.”
A similar experience occurred when, a week later, the great Jean Paul Laurens halted in amazement and disgust before his performance.
“This,” said he, “is a series of trivial incidents, of disjointed details! To we artists the human figure is a mass of light and shade. It is not made up of legs and hands, and breasts, and ears and teeth. No—by the good God, no!”
With which he seized a brush and scrabbled a quantity of flake white over the entire surface.
“Good!” he said. “It is finished.” And passed on to the next.
Thinking the matter over in bed that night Wynne realized he had learnt a great and valuable lesson: breadth of view—visualizing life as a whole. It was knowledge that could be applied to almost everything. Detail merely existed as part of the whole, but the whole was not arrived at by assembling detail.
The same would apply, he perceived, to every art, to business, too, and to life in general. He began to understand how it was possible for people like Wallace and his father to have their place in the scheme of things. They ceased to exist as individual items, brought into undue prominence by enforced propinquity, but became parts of a great machinery whose functions were too mighty to comprehend. These were the shadows which gave tone-value to the high-lights. They were vital and essential, and without them there would be no contrast, no variety, nothing but flat levels—dull and marshy—and never a hill on the horizon showing purple in the morning sun.
“I must learn this trade of painting,” said Wynne, “it’s the short road to all knowledge.”
He flung himself into the work with an energy truly remarkable. From early morning till midnight he battled with the craft, and thought and talked of nothing else. In the cafés, where students met and thrashed out their thousand ideas, Wynne was well bethought, for although his skill with a brush was small he could advance and support a theory with the liveliest talker in the Quartier. His success in argument was, perhaps, not altogether of advantage to his immortal soul, since it led him to cultivate a cynical attitude toward most affairs. He very readily became conversant with the works of the Masters, old and new, and praised or attacked them with great impartiality. Preferably he would detract from accepted geniuses, and deliver the most scathing criticisms against pictures before which mankind had prostrated itself for centuries. One day he would admit of the value of no artist save Manet, and another would accuse him of possessing neither skill nor artistry, but merely “a singularly adroit knack of expressing vulgarity.”
He did not attempt to be honest in regard to his points of view, being perfectly satisfied so long as he could hold a controversial opinion.
Not infrequently high words would result from these discussions, and on one occasion a table was overset, glasses smashed, and a chair flung. Police arrived on the scene, and Wynne and three companions spent the night in a lockup. This he did not mind in the least, and continued to air his views in the small hours of the morning until threatened with solitary confinement unless he desisted.