“Oh, I don’t agree in the least,” he said. “I think we always ought to try to record just those suggestions—those vaguenesses—which you say you leave out. Look at ‘La Gioconda.’ What did Andrea mean us to think about that sphinx? I don’t know, nor do you. And, what is more certain than even that, nor did he know. Did he mean what Walter Pater said he meant? It again is quite certain he did not. No, I think every picture ought to ask an unanswerable riddle, any picture, that is to say, which is a picture at all, a riddle like ‘Which came first, the hen or the egg?’ Surely anything obvious is not worth painting at all.”
Mr. Dennison had clearly not thought of things in this light. It was not thus that the ordnance map of Sutherland would be made.
“An amusing paradox,” he said. “Nobody is to know anything about a picture, especially the man who painted it. Is that correct?”
His tone had something slightly nettled about it, and Evelyn’s imperturbable good humour and gaiety might perhaps represent the indifference of the nettles towards the hand they had stung.
“Yes, just that,” he said. “Take any of the arts. Surely it is because a play has a hundred interpretations that it is worth seeing, and because a hundred different people will experience a hundred different emotions that an opera is worth listening to. And the very fact that when we hear ‘The jolly roast beef of old England’ we are all irresistibly reminded of the jolly roast beef of old England shows that it is a bad tune.”
Mr. Dennison waved his hand in a sketchy manner.
“I have not the pleasure of knowing that tune,” he said; “but when I paint the upper glen here, I mean it to produce in all beholders that perception of its particular and individual beauty which was mine when I painted it. And when you exercise your art, your exquisite art, over a portrait, you, I imagine, mean to make the result produce in all beholders the beauty you saw yourself.”
“Oh, dear, no,” he said. “You see, I so often see no beauty in my sitters, because most people are so very plain. But I believe that the finest portraits of all are those which, when you look at them, make you feel as you would feel if you were on intimate terms and in the presence of the people they represent. Besides, people are so often quite unlike their faces; in that case you have to paint not what their faces are like but what they are like.”
Mr. Dennison’s tone was rising a little; that impressive baritone could never be shrill, but it was as if he wanted to be a tenor.