“Welcome, fair coz,” he said, gripping Matt’s hand heartily. “I feel as if I were in Shakespeare. A moment ago I scarcely remembered I had a relation in the world. Confound it! why weren’t you a girl cousin while you were about it?”
“Herbert, don’t be rude,” said his father.
Herbert elevated his blond eyebrows. “I wish you would cultivate a sense of humor, dad,” he observed, wearily. Matt, who was responding to his grip, fascinated instantly by the boyish, sunny charm, loosed his clasp in sheer astonishment at the transition.
Matthew Strang disregarded his son’s observation, but gruffly told the model, whose attitudinizing immobility was irritating, that he need not pose for a moment or two, whereupon Herbert bade him begone altogether. “I’ve been off color all day,” he observed, explanatorily, as he counted out the model’s silver, “but the excitement of discovering I am not alone in the world is the finishing touch.”
Matthew threw a rather reproachful look at Matt, whose eyes drooped guiltily. He raised them immediately, however, in accordance with his uncle’s instructions, to admire a study of a draped figure which was hung on a wall. The coloring struck him agreeably, though he found a certain feebleness in the drawing which was equally agreeable to his jealous mood. This not displeasing impression was borne out by the other pictures and sketches for which his uncle besought his admiration: always this facile poetic coloring and this indifferent draughtsmanship, this suggestion of difficulties shirked rather than of difficulties overcome; at last seen to be due to the conventional composition, most of the works, whether in chalk or water-color or oil, being pretty landscapes or single-figure studies in simple attitudes, or, when complicated by other figures, embracing episodes which seemed to have been transferred direct from other pictures, some of which, indeed, Matt had seen either in the originals or in engravings. To his astonishment, Herbert, who had been yawning widely, drew his attention to one such little bit.
“Don’t you recognize that?” he said. “Dad did at once. It’s a quotation from Millais.”
Matt looked puzzled at the phrase.
“ ‘Cribbing,’ the unwise it call,” expounded Herbert, “and so did dad, till I explained to him it was only quoting. When a great writer hits off a phrase it passes into the language, and when a great painter hits off a new effect of technique, or gets a happy grouping, I contend it belongs to the craft, as much as the primitive tricks of scumbling or glazing. We praise the mellow Virgilisms in Tennyson, but we are down upon the painter who repeats another’s lines. The Old Masters borrowed unblushingly, but we are such sticklers for originality, which, after all, only means plagiarizing nature. Didn’t Raphael crib his composition from Orcagna, and Michael Angelo copy Masaccio, and Tintoretto turn Michael Angelo’s Samson into Jupiter? Why, in the Academy at Venice I saw—”
“Have you been to Venice?” cried Matt, eagerly.
“Herbert has been to all the galleries of Europe,” said his father, impressively. “We travel abroad every year. It’s part of the education of a painter. How are you to know Bellini and Tintoretto if you don’t go to Venice? Velasquez and Titian cannot be fully studied by any one who has not been in Madrid; and the man who is ignorant of the treasures of the Louvre or of the Uffizi at Florence, where”—he interpolated with simulated facetiousness, laying his hand on Herbert’s shoulder—“I hope to see my boy’s portrait painted by his own hand one day—”