“Why, when you exhibit, that your pictures are not meant to be looked at.”
I laughed, though not quite at ease.
“But they are intended to represent what you do see without knowing it,” I said.
“But you don’t see it,” she persisted, “if you look straight at the things.”
I tried another tack:—
“I do,” I said; “and so will you, if you take the trouble to understand. The truth is that we have learned to look at all objects with sophisticated eyes. The schools have wrought that tangle about us, and the tangles within the tangle, until to our bewildered vision nothing appears as it is, but only as hidebound theory presents it. It is the purpose of us primitives to sweep away at one stroke all that accumulated litter of the schools, and to regard things once again with frank unbiassed eyes.”
“But you are not a primitive,” said Fifine; “so what is the good of pretending? You belong to the twentieth century, not the first, and have grown up from being one of the world’s schoolchildren. You might as well say that in education we all ought to go back to our ABCs. Art must grow, I suppose, with knowledge. For my part I am not interested to know what the men thought who scratched figures on bones and things, but what my own men think, the men of my own time, who try to speak to me in the language I understand. You call it confused and sophisticated: all I can say is that it isn’t to me.”
“Then you are satisfied with Art as you find it?”
“I am satisfied with its purpose and with its direction, as steadily pursued from age to age. Fancy thinking Botticelli all wrong, and Velasquez, and da Vinci, and wanting to sweep them away to get back to your bone-scratchers. I couldn’t live with a bone, however cleverly engraved; but I could live with that little picture on the wall there, because I should never tire of the food for thought it gave me. I think that an artist living day by day over his picture penetrates to the soul of things more deeply than any primitive capturing a passing impression. Not that some of yours are not beautiful bits of colour. But I suppose that was accident.”
So she chastised and patronised me. On that subject it was always the same. Call her a frank Philistine, if you like: she had clear views, at least, and she never compromised about them. She was very scornful of my insistence on the free rights of temperament. Art, she said, was the negation of all licence, which had never yet produced any enduring beauty in the world. Look at its decay contemporaneous with the corruption of the ancient monasteries. She had a plenty of information about many things. She called my school (which, by the by, I did not call it) the go-as-you-please school, likening it to a modern fashion of extravaganza in which every performer was at liberty to “gag” as he chose—a mere farrago of unconnected impromptus. She was sarcastic, too, about that deeper beauty I was unlucky enough to say my matured soul had come to crave; she supposed it must mean the bones I was after, to scratch my primitive impressions on.