But the boy has no perseverance, no application, no stability. Put him to one thing, and he runs away at once and tries to do another. Quite what I expected, quite what I expected.'
'Perhaps,' Eva ventured to say suggestively, 'if you'd sent him to a sculptor's in London at first, uncle, he might have been perfectly ready to stop there. But you see his natural taste was for sculpture, not for woodcarving; and I'm not altogether surprised myself to hear he should have left Exeter.'
The vicar put up his double eyeglass and surveyed Eva from head to foot, as though she were some wild animal, with a stare of mingled amazement and incredulity. 'Well,' he said slowly, opening the door to dress for dinner. 'Upon my word! What the young people of this generation are coming to is really more than I can answer for.'
CHAPTER X. MINNA IMPROVES HERSELF.
Five years is a long slice out of a young man's life, but the five years that Colin Churchill spent with Cicolari in London were of a sort that he need never have regretted; for though the work he learnt to do in the Italian's little shop and studio in the Maryle-bone Road was mainly self-taught, he found Cicolari always sympathetic and anxious to help him, and he had such opportunities of study and improvement at the British Museum, and the South Kensington, and the great houses in the suburban counties, as he could never have obtained in the artless wilds of his native west country. It was a grand day for Colin, the day when he first entered the smoky galleries in Great Russell Street and feasted his eyes on those magnificent Hellenic torsos, carved by the vivifying chisel of Pheidias himself. Cicolari was an easy master: he had an Italian's love of art for art's sake and he was proud of 'mai Englishman,' as he used to call him; the boy whom he had himself discovered in the midst of a profoundly inartistic race, and released from the petty drudgery of an uncongenial vulgar calling. He felt a genuine interest in Colin's success; so he allowed the boy as much time as possible for visiting the places where he could see the finest works of art in England, and helped him to see those which are usually locked up in rich men's tasteless houses from the eyes of all who would most appreciate them.
Colin's own taste and love for art, too, were daily developing. He saw all that he could see, and he read about all that he couldn't see, spending every penny of his spare money (after he had repaid poor little Minna's nine shillings) on books about sculpture and painting; and making frequent visits to the reading-room and galleries at the great Museum. Now and then, too, when the trade in mourning widows was slack, when busts were flat and statuettes far from lively, Cicolari would run down into the country with him, and explore the artistic wonders of the big houses. At Deepdene they could look at Thorwaldsen's Jason and Canova's Venus: at Knole they gazed upon Vandycks, and Rey-nolds's, and Constables, and Gainsboroughs; in London itself they had leave to visit the priceless art collections at Stafford House, and half a dozen other great private galleries. So Colin Churchill's mind expanded rapidly, in the midst of the atmosphere it should naturally have breathed. Not books alone, but the mighty works of the mightiest workers, were the documents from which he spelt out slowly his own artistic education. Later on, men who met Colin Churchill at Rome—men who had gone through the regular dull classical round of our universities—were astonished to find that the Dorsetshire peasant-sculptor, of whom they had heard so much, was a widely cultivated and well-read man. They expected to see an inspired boor wielding a sculptor's mallet in a rude labourer's hand: they were surprised to meet a handsome young man, of delicate features and finely-stored mind, who talked about Here and Aphrodite, and the nymphs who came to visit the bound Prometheus, as if he had known them personally and intimately all his life long in their own remote Hellenic dwelling places.
And indeed, though the university where Colin Churchill took his degree with honours was not one presided over by doctors in red hoods and proctors in velvet sleeves, one may well doubt whether he did not penetrate quite as deeply, after all, into the inmost recesses of the great Hellenic genius as most men who have learnt to write iambic trimeters from well-trained composition masters, with the most careful avoidance of that ugly long syllable before the cretic in the two last feet, to which the painstaking scholar attaches so much undue importance. Do you think, my good Mr. Dean, or excellent Senior Censor, that a man cannot learn just as much about the Athens of Pericles from the Elgin Marbles as from a classical dictionary or a dog-eared Thucydides? Do you suppose that to have worked up the first six Iliads with a Liddell and Scott brings you in the end so very much nearer the heart and soul of the primitive Achæans than to have studied with loving care the vases in the British Museum, or even to have followed with a sculptor's eye the exquisite imaginings of divine John Flaxman?
Why, where do you suppose Flaxman himself got his Homer from, except from the very same source as poor, self-taught Colin Churchill—Mr. Alexander Pope's correctly colourless and ingenious travesty? Do you really believe there is no understanding the many-sided essentially artistic Greek idiosyncrasy except through the medium of the twenty-four written signs from alpha to omega? Colin Churchill didn't believe so, at least: and who that has seen his Alcestis, or his Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, or his Death of Antigone, can fail to admit that they are in very truth the direct offshoots of the Hellas of Sophocles, and Æschylus, and Pheidias?