“I have one finished picture, sir,” said the poor boy; “but the price is high!”
He brought it, in a faint-hearted way; for he had shown it to five picture-dealers, and all five agreed it was hard.
He had painted a lime-tree, distant fifty yards, and so painted it that it looked something like a lime-tree fifty yards off.
“That was mesquin,” said his judges; “the poetry of painting required abstract trees, at metaphysical distance, not the various trees of nature, as they appear under positive accidents.”
On this Mr. Gatty had deluged them with words.
“When it is art, truth, or sense to fuse a cow, a horse, and a critic into one undistinguishable quadruped, with six legs, then it will be art to melt an ash, an elm, and a lime, things that differ more than quadrupeds, into what you call abstract trees, that any man who has seen a tree, as well as looked at one, would call drunken stinging-nettles. You, who never look at nature, how can you judge the arts, which are all but copies of nature? At two hundred yards' distance, full-grown trees are more distinguishable than the animal tribe. Paint me an abstract human being, neither man nor a woman,” said he, “and then I will agree to paint a tree that shall be no tree; and, if no man will buy it, perhaps the father of lies will take it off my hands, and hang it in the only place it would not disgrace.”
In short, he never left off till he had crushed the non-buyers with eloquence and satire; but he could not crush them into buyers—they beat him at the passive retort.
Poor Gatty, when the momentary excitement of argument had subsided, drank the bitter cup all must drink awhile, whose bark is alive and strong enough to stem the current down which the dead, weak things of the world are drifting, many of them into safe harbors.
And now he brought out his picture with a heavy heart.
“Now,” said he to himself, “this gentleman will talk me dead, and leave me no richer in coin, and poorer in time and patience.”