“Young, gay,
Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.”
A sudden fear that he was not a genius himself was like a vivisector’s knife through his heart, laying bare with painful incision its secret hope.
“Do you think Clinch gets his effects without bothering?” he asked, with anxiety.
“O heavens! no,” said Matthew Strang, authoritatively. “I once watched him at work. He was squatted on a tiny stool, looking up at his picture, and painting upward. He had a cigarette in his mouth, which he was always relighting. Every now and then he would sigh heavily, or swear at himself or his model, and sometimes he would go and lie on the hearth-rug and stare solemnly at the canvas; then jump up, give one touch, swear if it went wrong, paint it out, and then go and stand in the corner with his face to the wall, probably in meditation, but looking exactly like a naughty little boy at school.”
Matt smiled, half at the picture of Clinch in the corner, half from relief at finding that even men who swore and drank far more than he did suffered quite as acutely in the parturition of the Beautiful. He fell back on the theory of an essential inner delicacy behind the occasionally coarse envelope of artistic genius, just as grossness could lurk beneath a gentlemanly refinement.
They ultimately found Herbert in the billiard-room, with a cue in one hand and a “soda-and-whiskey” in the other. “I don’t want to look at the pictures,” he protested. “If they’re decent I’ll see them in the Academy, and if they’re rot it’s waste of time seeing them at all. As for the entertainment, you can get a better at any music-hall—at least, so I’ve been told.” Nevertheless, he himself took Matt to another conversazione the same week, the far more homely gathering of the St. George’s Sketching Club, where the refreshments were gratis and evening dress was taboo, and really famous people scrambled for the bread-and-cheese and beer, of which there was not enough, and members disported themselves in their models’ costumes for the edification of a company which had turned its back on their pictures. For the Academy itself Matt paid his shilling, into such extravagant habits had he slipped since the days of his arrival in London, when a National Gallery catalogue was beyond his far fatter purse. But he came away much less inspired than from that momentous visit, his imagination untouched, save once or twice, as by Erle-Smith’s personalized projections of mediæval romance, in which the absence of real atmosphere seemed only natural. There were so many smooth portraits of uninteresting people that he was reminded drearily of his Nova-Scotian drudgery, when his heaven-scaling spirit had to stoop to portray and please some tedious farmer who was sometimes not even picturesque. It did not occur to him how unfair was the latent comparison with the National Gallery; he forgot that Art is short and the Academy long, that one can no more expect a batch of great pictures every year than a batch of great novels or of great symphonies.
Tarmigan had a picture of “The Rape of the Sabines.” It was hung on the line, and Grainger’s was very proud of it. In the discussion on the Academy (which supplied the class with the materials for a fortnight’s carping) it was the only picture that escaped even “Bubbles’s” depreciation, though he declared he would never himself paint like that, which the curly-headed wag eagerly admitted. One of the students had secured a place in the “skies,” and his success made Matt regret he himself had not dared to send in.
Grainger’s own contribution had been rejected, which made his pupils think more highly of themselves.
Matt was more interested in the Azure Art Gallery, a little exhibition (mainly of landscapes with violet shadows) held by some young men about whom Herbert was enthusiastic; for they did not attempt, said he, to vie either with the camera or the conte. “If painting be an art at all,” he contended, “it can only be so by virtue of ignoring Nature. As Goethe said, ‘We call art Art because it is not Nature.’ The musician works up notes, the poet syllables into a music unlike anything in Nature, and so must the painter work up Nature’s colors and forms under the sole guidance of his artistic instinct. And whatever can be better expressed in words has no place in painting. These young men’s pictures tell no stories, and no truths either. They are merely concerned with color and line.”
Matt afterwards found that, with the exception of a couple of Scotchmen, these young men by no means accepted Herbert’s account of their aims; indeed, they rather regarded it as satirical, for to give truer impressions of Nature was precisely their boast and glory. Although Matt could not always credit them with success in this, still he found a note of life and fantasy in their work. He was especially struck by Cornpepper’s “Chimney on Fire in Fitzroy Street”—a flight of sparks falling and curving in a golden rain, in vivid contrast with the dark, starlit sky above and the black mass of spectators below, faintly illumined by street-lamps, and broken at the extreme end by the brassy gleam of the fire-engine tearing up the street. There were inaccuracies of detail, but Matt was immensely impressed by the originality of the subject and the touch of weirdness, and it was with joy that he accepted Herbert’s offer to take him to the Azure Art Club, where Cornpepper and his clique mostly forgathered. Since Herbert had misinterpreted them to his cousin, Matt had read a good deal about them in the papers, and they had held forth brilliantly to interviewers on the veracity of their rendering of Nature, Cornpepper going so far as to claim that you could not look at his landscapes without feeling—from the color of stone and sea, from the tints of the sky and the disposition of the clouds—what o’clock it was. Whereupon the interviewer had consulted a study of poppies on a cliff, and reported that it was half-past eleven, Cornpepper crying “Correct!” All of which did not fail to provoke counterblasts from the Academic camp and from the irresponsible concocters of facetious paragraphs.