“As we are brothers,” he said, “I will tell you that I paint landscapes. I like nothing on earth so well as the country. I was dragged up in the Borough. The country for me! But the lover of Nature and the gamekeeper and the farmer and the landowner spoil it by day. The people are stupid, brutal. The women are not at all beautiful. Their cowsheds are the only things they have not spoilt: they are still sweet. As a lad I read the pastoral poets, and I know that these things were once far different. So I live in London and paint landscapes at sixpence a-piece, sometimes four or five of them in a morning, so that I live well. I usually put a few red flowers in with the sixpennyworth. I am sixty-eight; my son will succeed me, but badly—badly.”
“How is that?”
“Because he says that he paints Nature as she is, which is impossible. I make no such mistake, as you shall see——I aim for suggestion. Here,” he said, producing one from his pocket (a brown field sloping up to a ridge of trees, painted black, against a silvery sky, and in that a few rooks). “Do you not hear there the wild, angry charm of hundreds of blackbirds and thrushes and larks? They sometimes make me lie down and cry before the sun rises, because I am not worthy; I do not own a little farm and drive my own plough and cause the envy of kings at my happiness.”
“Is that clump of trees right?” I asked (in need of something to say).
“Right? But the feeling is there. Is it not cold and pure and wild? I felt great as I did that. But see here again!”
Here he brought out another, also in three colours, of a landscape at dawn. Three black firs stood at the top of a steep down, and from them went a pair of dark birds out along a silver sky.
“I never put figures in my landscapes,” he explained, “but is not the spirit of a small sweet Amaryllis in it? Ah! lovely as thou art to look upon, ah, heart of stone, ah, dark-browed maiden! Does she not hide somewhere out of the picture; and does not a shepherd, seated perhaps under those fir trees, look for her coming? Is not the Golden Age in that sky?”
“I am glad,” said I, “that you believe in a Golden Age. Literature and art are continually recreating it for us.”
“Modern literature,” he said scornfully, “is by those who have not seen for those who do not care. What answer has literature to this?” Here he showed a third sketch.