XI
THE HAND OF THE MASTER
It was on Christmas Day, 1914, that I received one of the strangest documents I had ever read. It was in the form of a letter from Jonathan Martin, who had made himself a torch of ambition and fear to many moths in London by painting portraits that were certain to be the pictures of the year, but also certain to reveal all the idiosyncrasies, good and bad, of their subjects. It was the fashion to call him cynical. In fact, he was an artist, and a great one.
His unusual power of eliciting unexpected meanings from apparently meaningless incidents and objects was not confined to his art. In private conversation, he would often startle you with a sentence that was like the striking of a match in a dark room. You didn't know that the room was dark until he spoke; and then, in a flash, mysterious relationships at which you had never guessed, were established. You caught a glimpse of an order and a meaning that you had not discerned before. The aimless thing over which you had barked your shin became a coal scuttle; the serried row of dark objects that irritated your left elbow became the works of Shakespeare; and, if you were lucky, you perhaps discovered the button by which you could switch on the electric light, and then sit down by the hearth and read of "beauty, making beautiful old rhyme."
But this is a very faint hint of the kind of illumination with which he would surprise you on all kinds of occasions. I shall never forget the way in which he brought into a queer juxtaposition "the Day" that Germany had been toasting for forty years and the final request for an answer before midnight, which was embodied in the British ultimatum. He would give you a patch of unexpected order in the chaos of politics, and another in the chaos of the creeds—patches that made you feel a maddening desire to widen them until they embraced the whole world. You felt sure that he himself had done this, that he lived in a re-integrated universe, and that—if only there were time enough—he could give you the whole scheme. In short, he saw the whole universe as a work of art; and he conceived it to be his business, in his own art, to take this or that apparently isolated subject and show you just the note it was meant to strike in the harmony of the whole. He was very fond of quoting the great lines of Dante, where he describes the function of the poet as that of one who goes through the world and where he sees the work of Love, records it. But, please to remember, this did not imply that the subject was necessarily a pleasant one. Beauty was always there, but the beauty was one of relationships, not of the thing itself. As he once said, "an old boot in the gutter will serve as a subject if you can make it significant, if you can set it in relation to the enduring things." It is necessary to make this tedious preface to his odd letter, or the point of it may be lost.
"I want to tell you about the most haunting and dramatic episode I have encountered during these years of war," he wrote. "It was a thing so slight that I hardly know how to put it into words. It couldn't be painted, because it includes two separate scenes, and also—in paint—it would be impossible to avoid the merely sentimental effect.
"It happened in London, during the very early days of the struggle. One afternoon, I was riding down Regent Street on the top of a bus. The pavements were crowded with the usual throng. Women in furs were peering into the windows of the shops. Newspaper boys were bawling the latest lies. Once, I thought I saw a great scribble of the Hand that writes history, where a theater poster, displaying a serpentine woman, a kind of Aubrey-Beardsley vampire, was half obliterated by a strong diagonal bar of red, bearing the words, 'Kitchener wants a hundred thousand men.' My mind was running on symbols that afternoon, and I wondered if it did perhaps mean the regeneration of art and life in England at last.
"Then we overtook a strange figure, a blind man, tapping the edge of the pavement with a rough stick, cut out of some country hedgerow. He was carrying, in his left hand, a four-foot pole, at the top of which there was nailed a board, banner-wise, about three feet long and two feet wide. On the back of the board, as we overtook him, I read the French text in big red letters: 'Venez a moi, vous tous qui etes travaillés et chargés, et je vous soulagerai.'
"On the other side of the board, as we halted by the curb a little in front of him, there was the English version of the same text, in big black letters: 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden, and i will give you rest.'