Often Mendel kissed his reproduction reverently and hugged it to his bosom, thinking childishly that some of its spirit could enter into him by contact. He whispered to it:—
“I love you. You are my truth and my joy rising up through life, even from its very depths, and shaking free of it at last into pure, serene beauty. You weigh neither upon my senses nor upon my thoughts, but, following you, they are joined together to become a high sense which can know deliverance.”
Followed days of a supreme delight. He wandered through the streets seeing all men and all women and all things as wonderful, since through them all flowed this lovely spirit which in the few men here and there could find its freedom and its expression in form.
Through Thompson he met a journalist who was writing a book about the new painting, and from him he learned the little that was known about Cézanne: how he worked away experimenting unsuccessfully until he was middle-aged, and then withdrew from the world of artists in Paris, to live the life of a simple country bourgeois and to paint the vision which he had begun to divine: and how he painted out in the fields, leaving his canvases in the hedges and by the wayside, because not the painting but the expression of his spirit and the solution of his problem mattered to him: and how he never sold a single picture, never attempted to sell them.
Such, thought Mendel, should the life of an artist be. But how was it possible if life would not let him alone, but was perpetually dragging him down into the mud? What mud, what filth he had had to flounder through to get even so far as he had!
And already he began to feel that he was slipping back. He could not accept that knowledge of the spirit vicariously, but must fight for his own knowledge of it in direct contact with life. To endeavour to escape from life was to isolate himself, to lose the driving force of life from darkness into the light, to dwell in the twilight of solitude armed only with his puny egoism and the paltry tricks of professional painting. He felt that at last he knew his desire, but in no wise how to attain it. Cézanne had had a wife: that had settled one of the torments of life. He had had ample means: that had absolved him from the ever-present difficulty of money.
These considerations relieved Mendel from another weighty puzzle. Perhaps if Cézanne had had to please other people and not only his own spirit, he would have cared more for his craft and for the quality of his paint. . . . All the same, it was good to have pictures reduced to their bare essentials, relieved of ornament and trickery, and yet retaining their full pictorial quality.
Shortly after the party Logan and Oliver had moved to a little cottage on Hampstead Heath, just below Jack Straw’s Castle. Mendel went to see them there and met Logan on the Spaniard’s Road. He was in a deplorable condition. His right eye was blackened, his nose was bloody and scratched, the lobe of his ear was torn and his forehead was purple with bruises.
“What on earth have you been doing to yourself!” asked Mendel.
“I’ve had a fight,” said Logan glibly. “The other night on the Heath I came on a man beating a girl. I went for him. He was a huge lout of a man. We had a terrific tussle, and just as I was getting him down the girl went for me and scratched my face.”