The Master; a Novel

by Israel Zangwill

Under the banter of the art-critic smoking cynically on the sofa, Matt was put upon his mettle to group all the figures and dispose the lines so as to escape the pitfalls lurking on every side, and likewise satisfy the conditions of the pedantic professors.

“We must get as much subject as possible into it,” explained Herbert. “They give you such a small space—only fifty by forty—that you must crowd all you know into it.”

Gradually the composition took shape, with infinite discussion, daily renewed. Matt was for pillars with curious effects of architecture. Herbert objected that pillars would make the perspective too difficult, and only consented on the laughing stipulation that Matt should work out the angles. And Herbert was very averse from Matt’s suggestions of strange original attitudes for the figures.

“That ’ll make some awfully stiff foreshortening,” he grumbled.

“What does it matter? You’ll have models,” Matt would reply.

“It’s all very well. You haven’t got to do the work,” Herbert would retort.

And when the grouping was settled, the color and the drapery brought fresh argumentation, the young men working as at a chess problem till the puzzle of arriving at the original without deserting the Academic was solved. And as, in the solution of a chess problem by a pair of heads, the suggestion of the winning moves has been so obscured by the indefinite suggestion of abortive moves by both, that neither remembers to which the final discovery of the right track was due, so Matt would have been surprised to be told that the ideas that had been retained were all his, and the ideas that had been rejected were all Herbert’s. The thought of apportioning their shares in the final scheme never crossed his mind, even though it was his hand that always held the experimentative pencil. Indeed, the technical interest of the task had absorbed every other thought, and the details of the tentative were lost in the triumph of the achieved, and obscured as by a cigarette cloud of happy mornings.

And then Herbert told his father he must have new models fresh to studios.

“I don’t want ’em from Haverstock Hill or Lillie Road,” he said—”women who’ve been hung in every gallery. I don’t want your Italians from Hatton Garden, or professionals that any of the other fellows might get hold of and extract my ideas from. Besides, new faces will give me a better chance.”

And Matthew Strang the Elder recognized there was some reason in his son’s request; but he pointed out it was not so easy to go outside the stock families, especially for figure models, and that old hands often helped the painter. But Herbert easily overrode his objections. It was only the conventional attitudinizings and foreshortenings which they understood, the quotations of art, which he was now about to abandon in deference to paternal prejudice; and so Matthew Strang, morbidly solicitous, obediently brought picturesque Orientals for Daniel and the King and the satraps and the counsellors, and blushing brunettes for the beauties of the Court; and Herbert set to work to reproduce in large on the canvas Matt’s rough charcoal scheme of the whole, and his own or Matt’s studies of the parts; and when Herbert blundered, Matt suggested with pastel a change of tone or color or outline, sometimes even taking up the brush when Herbert was lazy—as Herbert often was. Matt was never surprised to find the work no more advanced than when he had gone away the morning before, for Herbert’s mind was on many and more important things. The Academy students were rehearsing a burlesque which he had written for their dramatic society, and he sometimes slipped out to the rehearsals, lamenting to Matt that, through his father’s insistence on steady work, he could not even play in his own piece. The only recreation allowed him was a ride in the Park on a hired hack, and even that, he grumbled, was to enable him to salute cantering R.A.’s. Sometimes he went to tea with the girl students at restaurants. Sometimes he went to balls, and was too tired on the day after to do anything but describe them. They were always painters’ dances; “The Old Gentleman blocks others,” he said. On one occasion the host was an R.A., whose son was a fellow-student at the schools, and then “The Old Gentleman chortled.”