"Mr. Peter Calvin!" exclaimed the other, in some surprise.
"Yes; he has bought one of Arthur's pictures, and he wants Arthur to propose him at the St. Filipe Club, I believe."
She spoke in perfect ignorance of the tumult her words excited in her hearer's mind. Long after Edith was gone Helen sat looking out into the darkening sky and thinking of Arthur Fenton. She had heard him talk too often about Mr. Peter Calvin not to know what was implied by this new friendship. Mr. Peter Calvin had been for years the head and front of Boston Philistinism in art. He had been the patron of subservient artists; the chairman of committees for the purchase of public statues; an elegant writer upon such live and timely topics as Plaster Casting among the Egyptians, Notes upon Abyssinian Statues, while his monograph upon the question, What Was the Original Cost of the Venus de Milo? had by his flatterers been pronounced the masterpiece of all known art essays for power and critical research. His was a prominent name upon the covers of dilettante art journals; it was he who effectually crushed young and too daringly independent artists; who repressed impertinent originality; who headed the hosts of conventionality against individuality or genius which held itself above the established canons of antiquated tradition. He was the High Priest of Boston conservatism; the presiding genius of Philistia; and until the St. Filipe Club entered a protest against him by refusing to admit him to membership, his power had scarcely received a blow.
Tom Bently always insisted, with much profanity, that Mr. Peter Calvin was a joke.
"He writes with tremendous pomposity," Tom would say, "and he is in no end of societies for molly-coddling art. He goes on, too, about the plaster casts at that hospital for decrepit gods, the Art Museum, as if his whole soul was in the plaster barrels of the Greeks. But bless your soul! It's only his little joke. He doesn't really mean any thing by it. He's only a stupendous joke himself."
The Pagans, so far as they were to be regarded as an entity, represented the protest of the artistic soul against shams. They stood for sincerity above everything; for utter honesty in art, in life, in manners and morals alike. To them Philistinism was the substitution of convention for conviction. For the spirit of imitation, of blind subservience to authority, the Pagans had no tolerance. While they held themselves always open to conviction, they refused assent to any thing which was offered them ex cathedra; they devoted themselves to art with a passion of enthusiasm which was in itself the highest expression of their principles. That they seemed often iconoclastic was in reality less the result of their hatred of authority than the prevalence of unreasoning, and therefore by their standards necessarily insincere, adherence to established formulae. Dogmas they hated, not because they were popularly received, but because although they had been vital realities to their originators, they had become in time mere lifeless forms, held in reverence by blind devotees long after the soul had gone out of them.
In art especially the Pagans demanded the most absolute surrender of self to truth; and it should be added that they defined truth exactly as Helen did, "that which one sincerely believes." They had no condemnation too severe or sweeping for the artist who worshipped the golden gods of Philistia by following popular conventions at the expense of his honest art ideals. It is not impossible that they carried this feeling to extremes sometimes, suspecting every thing which was stamped with popular approval, but in the main at least their standard was of the highest and their lives conformed well to it. Measured by the creeds they rejected, they might often enough be found wanting; tried by their own, there had never been an apostate among them until the defection of Fenton.
No one had been more bitter and outspoken in his condemnation of Mr. Calvin and of what he represented than Arthur Fenton. Many a time he had entertained Helen with stories of the presumption and the ignorance of this man whom now he was receiving into his friendship, or, more properly, in whose train of sycophants he had taken his place.
Helen could not forgive him. Leaving dinner untasted, she sat with burning cheeks in the darkness, mourning over the apostacy of the man who had been her warmest friend.