“That is all very well while you are young,” said Logan, “but you have to individualize it when you are older. One person becomes a point of contact. You can’t just float through humanity like an apparition.”
Mendel had lost the thread of his argument, though not his confidence in its truth.
“That is not what I meant,” he said, “and I don’t see how a person could be just a point of contact.”
“All I know is that Oliver is such a point of contact to me, and I know that unless art is inspired with some such feeling as you have described, all the technical skill and all the deft trickery in the world won’t make it more than a sop for fools or an interesting survival of mediævalism. That is why I think you are going to be so valuable. You have so little to unlearn. You have only to shake off the most antiquated religion in the world and you can look at life and human nature without prejudice, while I have constantly to be uprooting all sorts of prejudices in favour of certain ways of living, morally and socially.”
Mendel was beginning to feel comfortable and easy, for while his mind worked furiously he could rarely express what he thought, and Logan in his talk often came near enough to it to afford him some relief and to urge him on to renewed digging in the recesses of his mind. It was a vast comfort to him to find that there were other vital thoughts besides that of Morrison, and that for ecstasy he was not entirely dependent upon her. Warmed up by his confidence in Logan, he resolved to tell him about the girl and the vast change she had wrought in his life.
“I used to think,” he said, “that if I stayed among my own people I could work my way through the poverty and the dirt and the Jewishness of it all to art. When she came I knew that it was impossible. She had something that I needed, something that the Jews do not know, or never have known. It is not my poverty that denies it to me, for if the poor Jews do not know a good thing, the rich Jews certainly do not, for the rich Jews are rubbish who stroke the Christians with one hand and rob them with the other. It is something that she knows almost without knowing it herself.”
Logan smiled.
“I am not a fool about her,” cried Mendel. “She is not particularly beautiful to me. There is only one line in her face that I think beautiful, from the cheek-bone to the jaw. I am not a fool about her, but I had almost given the Christian world up in despair. It seemed to me so bad, so inhuman, so hollow, so full of plump, respectable thieves. The simple thieves and bullies of my boyhood seemed to me infinitely preferable. And I had met some of the most important people in the Christian world: all empty and callous and lascivious. And the unimportant people were good enough, but dull, so dull. . . . Then comes this little girl. She is like Cranach’s Eve among monkeys. She becomes at once to me what Cranach’s wife must have been to him. He painted her as child, girl, and woman. The chattering apes matter to me no more. The Christian world is no longer empty. It is still lascivious and greedy, soft and ill-conditioned, puffy and stale, but it is suddenly full of meaning, of beauty, of a joy which, because I am a Jew, I cannot understand.”
“Give it up,” growled Logan, “give it up. Paint her portrait and let her go. You are a born painter. To a painter women are either paintable or nothing. For God’s sake don’t go losing yourself in philosophy.”
“It is not philosophy!” cried Mendel indignantly. “It is what I feel.”