“Our country could also claim Marston. You forget that, monsieur.”
The instructor spread his hands in a deprecating gesture.
“Ah, mon ami, that is debatable. True, your country gave him birth, but it was France that gave him his art.”
“Did you know,” suggested Steele, “that some of the unsigned Saxon pictures have passed competent critics as the work of Marston?”
Hautecoeur lifted his heavy brows.
“Impossible, monsieur,” he protested; “quite impossible! It is the master’s boast that any man who can pass a painting as a Marston has his invitation to do so. He never signs a canvas—it is unnecessary—his stroke—his treatment—these are sufficient signature. I do not belittle the art of your friend,” he hastened to explain, “but there is a certain—what shall I say?—a certain individualism about the work of this greatest of moderns which is inimitable. One must indeed be much the novice to be misled. Yet, I grant you there was one quality the master himself did not formerly possess which the American grasped from the beginning.”
“His virility of touch?” inquired Steele.
“Just so! Your man’s art is broader, perhaps stronger. That difference is not merely one of feeling: it is more. The American’s style was the outgrowth of the bigness of your vast spaces—of the broad spirit of your great country—of the pride that comes to a man in the consciousness of physical power and currents of red blood! Marston was the creature of a confined life, bounded by walls. He was self-absorbed, morbid, anemic. To be the perfect artist, he needed only to be the perfect animal! He did not understand that. He disliked physical effort. He felt that something eluded him, and he fought for it with brush and mahlstick. He should have used the Alpinstock or the snow-shoe.” Hautecoeur was talking with an enthused fervor that swept him into metaphor.
“Yet—” Steele was secretly sounding his way toward the end he sought—“yet, the latter pictures of Marston have that same quality.”
“Precisely. I would in a moment more have spoken of that. I have my theory. Since leaving Paris, I believe Marston has gone perhaps into the Alps, perhaps into other countries, and built into himself the thing we urged upon him—the robust vision.”