I reflected, as we went into the house, where we found Ambient unfolding the Observer at the breakfast-table, that none of them were probably quite so queer as his sister. Mrs. Ambient did not appear at breakfast, being rather tired with her ministrations, during the night, to Dolcino. Her husband mentioned, however, that she was hoping to go to church. I afterwards learned that she did go, but I may as well announce without delay that he and I did not accompany her. It was while the church-bell was murmuring in the distance that the author of Beltraffio led me forth for the ramble he had spoken of in his note. I will not attempt to say where we went, or to describe what we saw. We kept to the fields and copses and commons, and breathed the same sweet air as the nibbling donkeys and the browsing sheep, whose woolliness seemed to me, in those early days of my acquaintance with English objects, but a part of the general texture of the small, dense landscape, which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears. Everything was full of expression for Mark Ambient’s visitor,—from the big, bandy-legged geese, whose whiteness was a “note,” amid all the tones of green, as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign,—from these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there, and looked, even at a distance, like trees of good company, conscious of an individual profile. I admired the hedgerows, I plucked the faint-hued heather, and I was forever stopping to say how charming I thought the thread-like footpaths across the fields, which wandered, in a diagonal of finer grain, from one smooth stile to another. Mark Ambient was abundantly good-natured, and was as much entertained with my observations as I was with the literary allusions of the landscape. We sat and smoked upon stiles, broaching paradoxes in the decent English air; we took short cuts across a park or two, where the bracken was deep and my companion nodded to the old woman at the gate; we skirted rank covers, which rustled here and there as wo passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on a heathery hillside, where, if the sun was not too hot, neither was the earth too cold, and where the country lay beneath us in a rich blue mist. Of course I had already told Ambient what I thought of his new novel, having the previous night read every word of the opening chapters before I went to bed.
“I am not without hope of being able to make it my best,” he said, as I went back to the subject, while we turned up our heels to the sky. “At least the people who dislike my prose—and there are a great many of them, I believe—will dislike this work most” This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn’t read him,—a class which is supposed always to sit heavy upon the consciousness of the man of letters. A man organized for literature, as Mark Ambient was, must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic ego, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have been, in his composition, sufficiently erect and definite. I will not therefore go so far as to say that he never thought of his detractors, or that he had any illusions with regard to the number of his admirers (he could never so far have deceived himself as to believe he was popular); but I may at least affirm that adverse criticism, as I had occasion to perceive later, ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an air of thinking it quite natural he should be offensive to many minds, and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always very stupid in regard to the author of Beltraffio. Of course he may have thought about them—the newspapers—night and day; the only point I wish to make is that he did n’t show it; while, at the same time, he did n’t strike one as a man who was on his guard. I may add that, as regards his hope of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of his books, it was only partly carried out. That place belongs, incontestably, to Beltraffio, in spite of the beauty of certain parts of its successor. I am pretty sure, however, that he had, at the moment of which I speak, no sense of failure; he was in love with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as, I suppose, for every artist, the act of execution had in it as much torment as joy, he saw his work growing a little every day and filling-out the largest plan he had yet conceived. “I want to be truer than I have ever been,” he said, settling himself on his back, with his hands clasped behind his head; “I want to give an impression of life itself. No, you may say what you will, I have always arranged things too much, always smoothed them down and rounded them off and tucked them in,—done everything to them that life does n’t do. I have been a slave to the old superstitions.”
“You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient? You have the freest imagination of our day!”
“All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have! The reconciliation of the two women in Ginistrella, for instance, which could never really have taken place. That sort of thing is ignoble; I blush when I think of it! This new affair must be a golden vessel, filled with the purest distillation of the actual; and oh, how it bothers me, the shaping of the vase—the hammering of the metal! I have to hammer it so fine, so smooth; I don’t do more than an inch or two a day. And all the while I have to be so careful not to let a drop of the liquor escape! When I see the kind of things that Life does, I despair of ever catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, life! If one risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long to believe it. You don’t know yet, my dear fellow. It is n’t till one has been watching life for forty years that one finds out half of what she’s up to! Therefore one’s earlier things must inevitably contain a mass of rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its tongue in its cheek, defying one to be real enough, and on the other the bonnes gens rolling up their eyes at one’s cynicism, the situation has elements of the ludicrous which the artist himself is doubtless in a position to appreciate better than any one else. Of course one mustn’t bother about the bonnes gens.” Mark Ambient went on, while my thoughts reverted to his ladylike wife, as interpreted by his remarkable sister.
“To sink your shaft deep, and polish the plate through which people look into it—that’s what your work consists of,” I remember remarking.
“Ah, polishing one’s plate—that is the torment of execution!” he exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. “The effort to arrive at a surface—if you think a surface necessary—some people don’t, happily for them! My dear fellow, if you could see the surface I dream of, as compared with the one with which I have to content myself. Life is really too short for art—one hasn’t time to make one’s shell ideally hard. Firm and bright—firm and bright!—the devilish thing has a way, sometimes, of being bright without being firm. When I rap it with my knuckles it doesn’t give the right sound. There are horrible little flabby spots where I have taken the second-best word, because I could n’t for the life of me think of the best. If you knew how stupid I am sometimes! They look to me now like pimples and ulcers on the brow of beauty!”
“That’s very bad—very bad,” I said, as gravely as I could.
“Very bad? It’s the highest social offence I know; it ought—it absolutely ought—I’m quite serious—to be capital If I knew I should be hanged else, I should manage to find the best word. The people who could n’t—some of them don’t know it when they see it—would shut their inkstands, and we should n’t be deluged by this flood of rubbish!”
I will not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, or to explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company, Mark Ambient revealed to me more and more that he looked at all things from the standpoint of the artist, felt all life as literary material There are people who will tell me that this is a poor way of feeling it, and I am not concerned to defend my statement, having space merely to remark that there is something to be said for any interest which makes a man feel so much. If Mark Ambient did really, as I suggested above, have imaginative contact with “all life,” I, for my part, envy him his arriere-pensée. At any rate it was through the receipt of this impression of him that by the time we returned I had acquired the feeling of intimacy I have noted. Before we got up for the homeward stretch, he alluded to his wife’s having once—or perhaps more than once—asked him whether he should like Dolcino to read Beltraffio. I think he was unconscious at the moment of all that this conveyed to me—as well, doubtless, of my extreme curiosity to hear what he had replied. He had said that he hoped very much Dolcino would read all his works—when he was twenty; he should like him to know what his father had done. Before twenty it would be useless; he would n’t understand them.
“And meanwhile do you propose to hide them,—to lock them up in a drawer?” Mrs. Ambient had inquired.