“Avast there, Rocks!” said Jimmy. “We don’t want any of your revolutionary notions here. What would you say if we denounced jammy shadows at the Academy dinner?”
“Avast yourself!” cried Cornpepper, rather angrily. “This is Liberty Hall. I won’t be classed with the new school, or with any school.” Cornpepper’s success had already made him feel the dead-weight of an extravagant school with which one is confounded. “Because I exhibit with you chaps, people credit me with all your views. You might as well say I agree with the president because I’m on the line in the Academy.”
“Have you got a picture in the Academy, Teddy? I didn’t notice it,” said Wilfred Smith, the journalist, thereby expressing what was in Matt’s mind too.
“There you are!” laughed Rocks. “When you come among us you’re lost. It’s only by our rejecting you that we make you famous. When you exhibit by yourselves, you stand out.”
“I allow Rocks to talk,” said little Cornpepper, with a good-natured smile. “He was the first to detect my talent, and I am really sorry to be the last to detect his. I think his big nudes are shocking. He and Tarmigan are a pair. Where is the point of painting heathen mythology?”
“I only paint the nude because I can’t paint clothes,” said Rocks, smiling. “You are all so versatile nowadays.”
“Ah, Teddy’ll come round to the classic, too, one day,” said Butler, with a weary expression on his strong, stern face. “You should have seen his joy when he got the invitation for varnishing-day.”
“Nothing of the sort,” cried little Cornpepper, glaring through his eye-glass and humping himself into a more owl-like curve. “I didn’t even accept the invitation. I wasn’t going to help the R.A.’s to correct their draughtsmanship.” The glare relaxed under his pleasure at the laugh, and he added, more quietly: “Do let us drop shop, for Heaven’s sake. I’m not one of a school—I’m myself. And I don’t say salvation lies with any sect. Give me style; that’s all I ask for.”
“Will you have it neat?” murmured Jimmy.
“Style, not school,” pursued Cornpepper, pleased with the phrase. “Take literature! There’s style in Boccaccio, and style in Flaubert, and style in Wycherley. Even a moral work may pass if it has style—Pope’s satires, for instance. So, too, in painting. I don’t find style in Bouguereau or Fred Walker, in Rocks or Tarmigan, who are only fit for chromos, but I do find it in Mantegna, in Fortuny, in Degas, in—”