And yet Mendel loved them in their simple dignity. They had a quality which he had found nowhere in the Christian world, where men and women had their thoughts centred on the good, leaving evil to triumph as it had triumphed in Oliver. . . . She had wanted good. With all the power of her insensate passion, her blind sensuality, she had wanted love, the highest good she could conceive. . . . But these old Jews were wiser: they wanted God, Whom they knew not how to attain. Yet God was ever present to them.
In Mendel, too, this desire for God became active and kindled his creative will. He plunged into his work with a frenzy, but soon recognized that he was committing the old offence and was “overseen.” . . . Yet how shall a man approach his God if not through art?
“Something is lacking!” cried Mendel desperately. “Something is lacking!”
His imagination flew back to that last sublime moment of friendship with Logan, but it lacked warmth. It seemed that he could not take it back into life with him, or that until he had established contact with life its force could not be kindled. . . . Oh! for sweet, comfortable things—flowers, and rare music, a white, gleaming tablecloth, and good meats!
He thought, with envy, of Edward Tufnell and his wife going along the road on either side smiling at each other, so happily smiling. And then he thought with more satisfaction of the old Jews. They were the wiser and the more solid. They walked in the middle of the way, and good and evil went on either side and neither could attain them. . . . His thoughts swung between those two extremes like a pendulum, and out of the momentum thus created grew a force in his mind which began to find its way towards the God he was seeking. But it was only in his mind. His force, his passion, were left slumbering in the hypnotic sleep imposed on them by the tragedy.
Yet the mental impulse kept him working in a serene ecstasy. He could make the design for his picture, and simplify his figures into a form in which he knew there was some beauty, or at least that it could hold beauty and let no drop of it escape.
He could return then to his normal life, and made Golda very happy by joking with her and spending many evenings in her kitchen.
“You should take a holiday,” she said. “You look tired out.”
“I will,” he said, “when the spring comes. I am going to be an artist, but I am afraid it will not mean carriages and horses and the King commanding his portrait to be painted.”
He had the very great joy of beginning to understand Cézanne’s delight in the intellectual craft of painting and to see why he had neglected the easier delights of handicraft and the mere pleasure of the eye. But the more he understood, the harder it became to finish his picture. He slaved at it, but there was still no beauty in it.