“Clowes is a jolly nice girl too,” replied Mitchell, “but she’s more ordinary. I never met anyone like Morrison before. I can’t make her out, but she does make me feel that I am an absolute rotter. It is her fresh enjoyment of simple things that disturbs me and makes me see what a mess I’ve made of my life. Once an artist loses that, he is finished.”
They had been reading Tolstoi on “What is Art?” and their young conceit had been put out by it. Must their extraordinary powers produce work accessible to the smallest intelligence? Mendel had been greatly influenced by that theory in his portrait of his mother, while Mitchell’s energy had been paralysed so that he could produce nothing at all.
“Yes,” Mitchell went on, “I know now what Tolstoi means. He means that love can speak direct to love, and, by Jove! it is absolutely true. Brains are only a nuisance to an artist. Look at Calthrop! He hasn’t got the brains of a louse. Of course, that is why painters are such an ignorant lot. I must tell my father that when he goes for me for not reading.”
“But Tolstoi liked bad artists!” grumbled Mendel. “And my mother does not like some of my best things. As for my father, he wants a painted bread to look as if he could eat it: never is he satisfied just to look at it. His love and my love are not the same and cannot speak to each other.”
“You should see more of Morrison, and then you would understand,” rejoined Mitchell.
Mendel felt that Mitchell was slipping away from him, and all this Christian talk of love was to him a corrosion upon his imagination and his nervous energy, blurring and distorting everything that he valued. There were many things that he hated, and yet because he hated them their interest for him was consuming. Issy’s wife, for instance, and her squalling children; his father’s bitter tongue; and Mitchell’s odd self-importance.
He repeated:—
“Tolstoi liked bad artists.”
“You can’t settle a big man like Tolstoi just by repeating phrases about him.”