As soon as she had finished her tea she set out to look for him, garrulous with excitement.
“Now what do you think it will have been that moved him? I wonder if it was the bay. No, he was standing on the top of the hill and he looked down and saw the village lying there in the sunlight! You take my word for it, we shall find him on the hill!”
But they did not find him on the hill, nor was he painting the bay nor the orange grove, and they sought him in vain on the skirts of their little orchard. At last they began to feel a little nervous and began to ask one another fretfully whether any harm could have come to him. They made inquiries of the natives, but learnt nothing, and it was not till almost dinnertime that a fisherman told them where he was.
“The young artist? Yes, sir. I saw him early this morning go into that little broken hut on the edge of the shingle, and though I have been working here all day I haven’t seen him come out. He’s probably there still.”
Mr and Mrs Abbot looked at each other askance. What could Eric want in that small dilapidated house that was slowly falling to pieces over the head of an old shrivelled woman and her daughter? At the thought of the daughter Mrs Abbot began to blush. What if the south wind and the sudden beauty had moved Eric to express himself in terms more personal than those of paint? Artists were notoriously immoral, and the islanders, she had always heard, unfortunately weak.
She hurried on, her heart beating quickly, excited and perturbed.
In a few moments, however, all her fears for the innocence of the gentle islander were banished. For there, at the back of the small hut, an old woman, black and shrivelled, was cooking her dinner over an iron stove. Her neck and arms were bare, and the red glow of the fire shone dimly on the damp flesh, the dying sunlight stealing in one long, broad band through a chink in the woodwork fell across her throat, cutting the curves of her hanging breasts into hard, sharp angles, and a few yards away Eric Walker was working at his canvas in a fine frenzy of inspiration.
VIII
WHAT is beauty to one man is ugliness to another. There is a proverb “about one man’s meat”; but there is a chariness about applying it to literature. Writers like to believe that a criterion of criticism exists; that their work is definitely good, bad, or indifferent.
Well; we are creatures of infinite limitations. A certain range of sentiment comes within the province of our comprehension; vast tracts of life must be for all time to us an unknown country. J. C. Squire announces that Jurgen is a poor book, but he does not persuade us that our admiration has been misplaced. We regard his article as the statement of a personal dislike. For criticism in the end comes always back to this: “I like it, or I do not like it.” Criticism is autobiography, as these pages are autobiography, the expression of personal preferences and distastes. And, on the whole, I think critics are ill advised to write of books that they do not like. Their inability to appreciate the book is as likely to be their fault as the author’s. And I find myself singularly out of sympathy with the type of critic who tries to explain his enthusiasms and disapprovals by metaphysics. He discusses for three pages what he considers to be the function of literature. “Literature,” he concludes, “is the sublimation of phenomena.” And, for the remainder of his article, proceeds to show which poets do, and which do not, satisfy the requirements of his formula. And, of course, he leaves us unimpressed. The ability to conduct an argument is not a proof of literary taste. And if the substance of the article is to be “I like, or do not like, this book,” then the critic is beholden to persuade us that he is a person whose opinion is deserving of attention. He can prove it to us in two ways, preferably in both. He can show that he has read and appreciated a quantity of good literature. “A man,” we say, “who has really appreciated Turgenev, should have a standard implicit in his emotional response to other books. If he says this book is good, there must be something in it.” Or the critic may prove by writing well and interestingly that he has a sense of literature. For there is nothing more damning to a book than a favourable, but ill-written, notice. “If the ass who wrote this,” the reader thinks, “liked that book, then I’m pretty certain that I shouldn’t.” Criticism would carry much more weight if it would forget its sense of responsibility, and would remember that its purpose is, as that of all literature, the entertainment of the reader.