He glanced anxiously at his cousin; but that enthusiastic young man was gazing at Butler with a hypnotized stare, lost in an inward vision of the youthful rebel painting in his stable-loft.
“It’s time to drop shop,” responded Cornpepper, sharply. “I’ve been trying to get the talk off art for the last half-hour. I want to discuss whiskey, woman, and song. What’s the difference who wins the Gold Medal, or even the Prix de Rome? That’s the last one ever hears of them.”
“Oh no,” said Rapper; “all the professors at the Beaux-Arts took the Prix de Rome.”
“Did the men with guts?” inquired Cornpepper, scathingly, as he glared through his monocle at his contradictor. “Did the biggest of all, Puvis de Chavannes? Now, you fellows define style, but it never occurs to you that it is simply the perfect handling of your medium, whatever it be. What makes the decorations of Puvis de Chavannes so great? Merely that the gray, cool color scheme just suits the stone of the Pantheon. The decorations of Laurens would be finer as easel pictures. They make the building look smaller. Those of Chavannes ennoble it, give the sense of space and atmosphere. The medium forced to yield its best—that is style. There is one glory of silver-point and another of chalk or pencil. Fritz’s pictures are damn bad because they are in the wrong medium. To preserve a chronicle of the time is the function of black and white. Only by—”
“I really must go,” said Jimmy, starting up again. “As a black-and-white man I preserve a chronicle of the time, and it tells me it’s a quarter-past ten, and I have got to meet my wife at the Monico at ten.”
“Oh, rot! There’s lots of time.” And a dozen hands pushed Jimmy into his seat, and Carrie brought him more whiskey.
“I never could see how you square that with your principles, Cornpepper,” argued Gurney, the gyrator, with a thoughtful wrinkle of his elderly face. “Every painter’s got to do his own time. Posterity won’t want Erle-Smith’s Greek gods with ginger-bread flesh, and sickly sea-nymphs with wooden limbs. A cod’s head, well painted, is better than a Madonna.” Erle-Smith had been his last idolized Master before he came to worship at the shrine of Cornpepper.
“But there’s imagination in Erle-Smith,” Matt protested, deferentially.
Gurney snorted out quintessence of contempt in an indecorous monosyllable. “ ‘Bus-drivers and ballet-girls—that’s the modern artist’s duty to posterity. And his duty to his contemporaries is to find the poetry and beauty around ’em and teach ’em to see it. That’s why your ‘Chimney on Fire in Fitzroy Street’ is the picture of the year.”
“Oh yes!” Matt burst forth, in the idiom of Granger’s, “it’s jolly stunning!”