“Is it? Well—affectation is a good word. Expression is not expression when it’s an affected expression. It’s the tone of voice of the picture. That sounds wild, but it means something. A speech in print hasn’t the expression it has when it’s well spoken. A photograph is a speech in print. It’s the truth done by machinery. It’s often striking at first sight, but you get tired of it, because what’s there is all there—and what is not there isn’t even suggested, though you know it exists.”
“Yes, I see,” said Katharine, who was interested in what he said, and had momentarily forgotten his personality.
“That shows how awfully clever you are,” he answered with a silvery little laugh. “I know it’s far from clear. There’s a passage somewhere in one of Tolstoi’s novels—‘Peace and War,’ I think it is—about the impossibility of expressing all one thinks. It ought to follow that the more means of expression a man has, the nearer he should get to expressing everything in him. But it doesn’t. There’s a fallacy somewhere in the idea. Most things—ideas, anything you choose to call them—are naturally expressible in a certain material—paint, wood, fiddle-strings, bronze and all that. Come and look at yourself now. You see I’ve restrained my mania for oils a few minutes. I’m trying to be conscientious.”
“I wish you would go on talking about expression,” said Katharine, rising and coming up to the easel. “It seems very much improved,” she added as she saw the drawing. “How fast you work!”
“There’s no such thing as time when things go right,” replied Crowdie. “Excuse me a moment. I’ll get something to paint with.”
He disappeared behind the curtain in the corner, to the out-built closet in which he kept his colours and brushes, and Katharine was left alone. She stood still for a few moments contemplating the growing likeness of herself. There was as yet hardly any colour in the sketch, no more, in fact, than he had rubbed on while she had watched him do it, when she had rested the first time. It was not easy to see what he had done since, and yet the whole effect was vastly improved. As she looked, the work itself, the fine pencil-line, the smudges of brown and the suggestions of colouring seemed all so slight as to be almost nothing—and yet she felt that her expression was there. She thought of her mother’s laborious and minutely accurate drawing, which never reached any such effect as this, and she realized the almost impossible gulf which lies between the artist and the amateur who has tried too late to become one—in whom the evidence of talent is made unrecognizable by an excess of conscientious but wholly misapplied labour. The amateur who has never studied at all may sometimes dash off a head with a few lines, which would be taken for the careless scrawling of a clever professional. But the amateur who, too late, attempts to perfect himself by sheer study and industry is almost certainly lost as an artist—a fact which is commonly interpreted to mean that art itself comes by inspiration, and that so-called genius needs no school; whereas it only means that if we go to school at all we must go at the scholar’s age and get the tools of expression, and learn to handle them, before we have anything especial to express.
“Still looking at it?” asked Crowdie, coming out of his sanctum with a large palette in his left hand, and a couple of brushes in his right. “Now I’m going to begin by spoiling it all.”
There were four or five big, butter-like squeezings of different colours on the smooth surface of the board. Crowdie stuck one of his brushes through the thumb-hole of the palette, and with the other mixed what he wanted, dabbing it into the paints and then daubing them all together. Katharine sat down once more.
“I thought painters always used palette-knives,” she said, watching him.
“Oh—anything answers the purpose. I sometimes paint with my fingers—but it’s awfully messy.”