Cornpepper made a moue of disgust. “Are we never going to get away from shop?” he asked, desperately. “What has my chimney to do with the chronicles of the time? You chaps have always misunderstood me. You all go by what O’Brien writes of me in the Saturday Spectator. I do wish he wouldn’t interpret me. I wish he’d leave me alone. It’s bad enough to have the papers writing about one’s sayings and doings, it’s bad enough to be afraid of your own friends when, like Levison and Wilfred Smith, they happen to be journalists; but to be interpreted in leading articles by O’Brien is the crowning blow. What right has he to meddle with art? Why the hell doesn’t he stick to his last? If I painted that chimney—”
“Instead of sweeping it,” murmured Jimmy. “Do let me go and meet my wife.”
“—it was because I saw an opportunity for style, and for giving an epic sense of London,” little Cornpepper went on, fixing Jimmy with his basilisk glare. “I don’t care a twopenny damn about posterity or my contemporaries. I paint as I do everything else—to please myself.”
“We know you don’t please anybody else,” retorted Jimmy. “I must be off.”
“Well, black and white is going to be the art of the future, anyhow,” said Butler. “Art is dead in England. Nobody disputes that.”
“Of course not,” said Cornpepper. “Painting’s a lost art. Not one of us can touch the old men—Watts, Millais, Whistler. No; we none of us can paint.”
“But English art’ll revive through black and white,” Butler maintained. “It’s the art of the people. I wish I had discovered that in the days when I refused to do it.”
“Black and white is not the art of the future, but the future of Art,” said Herbert. “Nothing else pays.”
“It’s surer than anything else,” admitted Gurney. “And a paper gives you a far wider appeal than a gallery. It’s the only way of elevating the people.” His eye lit up. He was meditating a new departure.
Matt pricked up his ears; Herbert had not yet repaid him the twenty-five pounds, borrowed for a day or two, and in any case he felt he must soon be earning money. In the stagnation of the picture market, of which he heard on every side, and on which the talk fell now, it was at once comforting and distressing to hear of another source of income. Black and white had scarcely entered into his thoughts before; he looked upon it as a degraded commercial form of art—a thing manufactured for the moment in obedience to editorial instructions. Perhaps if times had changed, if editors allowed the artist to express himself through their pages, one might think of it; otherwise it was too horrible. Art to order! The spirit whose essence was freedom chained to a cash-box! It were as well—and honester—to be a cobbler like William Gregson. He shuddered violently, remembering his sufferings as a portrait-painter in Nova Scotia, and very resolved to starve sooner than repeat those degrading efforts to please customers.