“Stick to art,” said Mendel. “I know nothing about the rest.”
“Do you remember my saying that the music-hall was all that was left of old England? I did not know how true it was. England has become one vast music-hall, with everybody with any talent or brains scrambling to top the bill. It runs through everything—art, politics, the press, literature, social reform, women’s suffrage, local government; and the people who top the bill can’t be dislodged, just like the poor old crocks on the halls, who come on and give the same show they were giving twenty years ago, and get applause instead of rotten eggs because the British public is so rotten with sentiment and so stupid that it can’t tell when a man has lost his talent. Please one generation in England and its grandchildren will applaud you, though everything about you is changed except your name. The result is, of course, that no talent is ever properly developed. A man reaches the point where he can please enough people to make a living, and he sticks there. Now, I ask you, is that a state of things which a self-respecting artist can accept?”
“No,” said Mendel. “No.”
“Well. It has to be altered. And who is to alter it if not the painters, who are less in contact with the general public than any other artists? Painters had a comfortable time last century, living on the North-country municipal councils, but that is all over and we are reduced to poops like Tysoe. There are any number of them, if one only took the trouble to dig them up, but they’re no good. I’ve lived on them for the last ten years, and they’re no good. You might as well squeeze your paints into the sink and turn on the tap for all the flicker of appreciation you get out of them. Then there are the snobs, the semi-demimondaines of the political set; but they are a seedy lot, with the minds and the interests of chorus-girls. You might whip up a little excitement at Oxford and Cambridge, but it would only vanish as soon as the young idiots came in contact with London and fell in love. . . . No. Behind the scenes of the music-hall is no good. We must make a direct onslaught on the general public. They must be taught that there is such a thing as art and that there are men devoted to the disinterested development of their talents—men who have no desire to top the bill or to make five hundred a week; men who recognize that art is European, universal, the invisible fabric in which human life is contained, and are content, like simple workmen, to keep it in repair.”
“I don’t know,” said Mendel, “if my brother-in-law Moscowitsch is typical, but he regards art which does not make money as a waste of time.”
“Oh! He is a Jew and uneducated. That’s where Tolstoi went so wrong. He confused the simplicity of art with the simplicity of the peasant, the dignity of the unsophisticated with the dignity that is achieved through sophistication. It may seem absurd to talk of bringing about anything so big through little Cluny, but it is not only possible, it is inevitable. The staleness of London cannot go on, and Paris seemed just the same to me. Stagnation is intolerable. There must come a movement towards freedom and a grander gesture, and the only free people are the painters. They are the only people whose work has not become servile and vulgarized. Through them lies the natural outlet. . . . Oh! I have been thinking and thinking, and I thank God we met before you had been spoiled by success or I had been ruined by my rotten swindling life—though that has had its advantages too, and I can meet the dealers on their own ground, and if necessary advertise as impudently as any of the music-hall artists.”
Oliver began to hammer on the door. He went and unlocked it and let her in.
“You can talk as much as you like now,” he said. “I’ve said my say.”
“I heard you,” she replied, “talking to Kühler as if he was a crowd in Hyde Park.”
Mendel was lost in thought. He was baffled by this association of art with things like politics and music-halls, which he had always accepted as part of the world’s constitution but essentially unimportant. He had no organized mental life. His ideas came direct from his instincts to his mind, and were either used for immediate purposes or dropped back again to return when wanted. However, he recognized the passionate nervous energy that made Logan’s words full and round, and he was glad to have him so accessible and so eager and purposeful. On the whole, it did not matter to him why Logan thought his work so important. No one else thought it so, and certainly no one else had taken so much trouble to help it to find recognition. Logan seemed to promise him public fame, and that would delight and reassure his father and mother more than anything else. They treasured every mention of his name in the newspapers, pasted the cuttings in a book, and produced it for every visitor to the house.