CHAPTER XIII.
Ned’s chance meeting with the painter, whose art was then much exciting, in a characteristic freak of perversity, the enthusiasm of his fellow-citizens, was the prelude to a strange little camaraderie between the two that, so long as it held, was full of positive and negative instruction to the younger man. It came about in this way, that, absorbed in the discussion of a topic of common interest, the gentlemen left the Thuilleries gardens together, M. David accompanying Ned eventually to the Rue Beautreillis. At the door of the fruiterer’s shop the famous artist held out his hand bluntly.
“You have the right religion,” he said: “in an artificial world the cleanest art shall prevail. We can have no standard of truth but what we set ourselves. Strip the model, then, of all meretricious adornments. Monsieur, I shall take the liberty to call upon you.”
He came, indeed—not once but often, walking over from his studio in the Louvre; dropping in at unexpected times; criticising the methods, the actual performance of the Englishman, and even condescending now and again to add to a sketch or canvas a few touches—technical mastery without imagination—that resolved in a moment a difficulty long contended with. Through all he would never cease to expound his views on right art and government—to him inseparable words in the condition of national sanity, and both drawn in their purity from the fountain-head of the S.P.Q.R. at its strictest period. Most often he would discourse, gazing, his hands behind his back, from the window, and sometimes quite aptly illustrating his homilies with types drawn from the human mosaic of the St Antoine below him.
M. David was at this time some forty years of age, an Academician, the acknowledged and popular leader of classic revivalism. He was fashionable, moreover, and had just completed (“mettant la main sur sa conscience”) a royal commission for a “Brutus”! Courted, prosperous, and respected, some moral myosis must still distort to his inner vision all the admiration he evoked. He would make his profit of patronage, secretly raging over the opulent condescension that his cupidity would not let him be without. He would see double entendre in the applause of the social élite, yet hunger for it, cursing himself that the vital flame of his self-confidence must be dependent on such fuel for its warmth. For in truth he was the tumid bug of vanity, bursting with the very scarlet adulation that his instinct told him was inimical to the artistic life and other than its natural food.
Contributing to, or proceeding from, this insane desire of self-aggrandisement, his professional and political convictions (he could not disassociate the two) ran in a restricted channel. But who shall distinguish, in any complaint that is accompanied by an unnatural condition of the nerves, between cause and effect? So M. David’s resentment of patronage may have inclined him to a creed of classic socialism; or his classic proclivities may have prejudiced him against the presumptions of self-qualified rank. In any case, he had twisted his theories, artistic and political, into one thin cord to discipline (or hang) mankind withal, and was as narrow a fanatic as was ever prepared to crucify the disputant that ventured to question his infallibility.
Now, at the outset, Ned fell into some fascination of regard for this casual acquaintance of his. His credo, social and technical, would appear to jump—its first paces, at least—with M. David’s. Moreover, the glamour that naturally informed the presentment of a notable personality condescending to the regard of a tyro who could boast no actual claim to its notice, induced him, no doubt—under this influence of a flattery indirectly conveyed—to an attitude of respectful consideration towards certain foibles in the stranger that, on the face of them, seemed irreconcilable with the highest principles of morality.
It was not so long, however, before his mind began to misgive him that his “half-God” was clay-footed—that here, indeed, was but another inevitable example of that subjective inconsistency that seems so integral a condition of the Gallic temperament. Then: “It is a fact,” he thought, “that one can never start to conjugate a Frenchman but one finds him an irregular verb. Where universal exceptions are to prove the rule, what rule is possible? Anarchy, and nothing else, is the logical outcome of it all.”
For M. David would cry to him, “In a Republic of Truth every unit must be content to contribute itself unaffectedly to the full design.” Yet (as Ned came to know) was no man more greedy than this Academician for vulgar notoriety—none more sensitive to criticism or more resentful of a personal slight. So he (M. David) would preach, not plausibly but whole-mindedly, a religion of purity and cleanliness—a religion of beauty, material and intellectual, whose very ritual should be Gregorian in its sweet austerity. Such were his professions; and nevertheless in the height of his revolutionary popularity he did not scruple to introduce into his pictures details that pandered to the most sordid lusts for the grotesque and the horrible—to generally, indeed, stultify his own declarations of belief by acts that no ethics but those of brutality could justify. Finally, it was in the disgust engendered of a flagrant illustration of such inconsistency that the young Englishman, after some months of gradual disenchantment, “cut” the king’s painter; fled, for solace of a haunting experience, eastwards again, and, snuffing with some new emotion of relish the frankincense of green woods, hugged himself over a thought of his seasonable escape from that national sphinx of caprice, to symbolise whom in a word one must draw upon modern times for the “cussedness” of Wall Street.
Yet even then, had he but foreseen it, he was backing, while dodging Scylla, into the very deadly attraction of Charybdis.