It was the red rag. For the next ten minutes the absurdities of the Academy and the transcendent merits of the Salon (which most of them had run over to Paris to see) occupied the tapis, and then a spectacled Scotchman, who answered to the name of Mack, dilated upon the decadence of the grisette and the degeneracy of the students’ orgies.
“Ah, but still Paris stands for the joy of life,” said Cornpepper. “They are not ashamed of living.”
“They ought to be,” said Matt, and the company laughed, as at a good joke.
“Our young friend thinks the artist should be moral,” said Herbert, paternally.
“He’ll say art should be moral next,” said Mack.
“It isn’t immoral, is it?” said Matt, feebly. As usual, he was half fascinated, half shocked by the freedom of the artistic standpoint, for which his intellect was ready, but not his deeper organization. He wondered again why he was so uncomfortably constructed, and he envied these others for whom their art seemed to flow in happy irrelation to conduct and character, or at least to the moral ideals of the bourgeois. He marvelled at them, too, not understanding how talents more subconscious than his own could lie in closed compartments, as it were, of the artists’ minds, apparently unaffected by the experiences of their temporary owners.
“Art’s neither moral nor immoral,” pronounced the little host, magisterially, as he grasped his perch more tightly, “any more than it’s lunar or calendar. The artist thinks and feels in line and color. He sees Nature green or gray, according to his temperament. There are as many views from Richmond Hill as there are artists. If two views are alike, one is a plagiarism. Nature will never be exhausted, for every man sees her differently.”
“And so long as he doesn’t see her double—” put in Jimmy.
“Quite so,” said Cornpepper. “So long as he isn’t too drunk to keep his brush steady, we ask no more of him. In fact, it’s always best to be in love with your sitter—that’s what gives chic.”
“Rot!” said a granite-faced, white-bearded septuagenarian who had been smoking in silent amusement. “Chic comes merely from painting with brushes too large for the work.”