She would not even allow him to arrange her furniture, and a pair of colossal pink vases, garishly hand-painted with pastoral figures (picked up “a bargain”), were a permanent pain to him, spoiling for him the drawing-room of the little North London house with the rude whitewashed studio, in which they had settled down after the birth of their first child. The temporary lull that attended their installation in British domesticity was succeeded by graver frictions when Rosina had finished furnishing. They had no society; neither of the couple knew anybody in London, and the husband shrank from making friends, constrained, moreover, by his art to a solitary way of living. Rosina, who before her child demanded her care had sat to him out of pure desire to be with him, began to be jealous of the models who replaced her, declaring that she had had no conception such goings-on were a part of art or she would never have married him.
The only alleviation of his numb misery was his ability to paint without pecuniary under-thought the picture with which he was to storm the Academy, to throw all his individuality into it. The very seclusion of his life favored this devotion to his ideals.
And these ideals were only partially those of his celibate. He had been swaying to and fro under the opposite solicitations of Idealism and Realism; now in a violent upheaval, his sympathy with modern subjects and even with modern methods had been submerged.
On the Continent for the first time he came into contact with the Old World. London had been to him as modern as America, repeating its ideas and ideals, but in France, and more especially in Italy, the mere variation of tongues helped to draw him into an earlier world, co-operated with the appeal of ancient churches and streets and palaces, and the countless treasure of ancient Art. The modern world grew hateful to him, and he absorbed by affinity the ancient and the mediæval. At bottom it was not so much the modern that repelled him as real life, and it was not so much the past towards which he yearned as towards that timeless realm wherein ideal beauty dwells. The past was at least less real than the present. Real life was horrible, and marriage had put the coping-stone on his dissatisfaction with it. From birth to death it was embased by a sordid series of physical processes. Even the much-vaunted love was hideous at root. Beauty itself was never really perfect, and was transient at best, while the beautiful idea that lurked in nearly every human face and figure had for the most part been left embryonic. Only in Art could the imperfections of Nature be corrected—and this was the Artist’s mission, not to imitate Nature, but to transcend her; from her faulty individuals, frail and perishable, to draw types of perfection, flawless, immortal, like that Venus de Milo, which stood at the end of the Louvre passage, beautiful from every standpoint, fixing in its pensive sweetness of spiritualized form his dream of Ideal Womanhood; or like that mighty torso of winged Victory that had achieved the last victory over its own mutilation. Real life was Deacon Hailey and his mad mother and Billy and Rosina and his uncle and the grimy denizens of the London slums and the blackguardly crowd at the Fleet Street public-house and the lewd workmen in the Starsborough ship-yard. But Art was Rosalind and Imogen, Hamlet and Ariel, Don Quixote and Beatrix Esmond, and the love in Shelley’s lyrics, and the music of Beethoven, and the pictures of Botticelli, and the cold white statues of the Greeks—that imaginary world which man’s soul had called into being to redress the balance of the Real. It was Art against Nature throughout—the immortal shadows against the ephemeral realities.
“She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.”
And so for the “real atmosphere” of Cornpepper he no longer cared: what mattered the realities of space more than those of time to the soul, emperor of its own fantasy? All this scientific precision after which he had been hankering—was it not irrelevant to Art? The Beautiful was the Ideal; to create the Ideal, the Real must be passed through the crucible of the Artist’s soul. The Artist was the true creator. In him Nature’s yearning to beget the Beautiful became conscious. She herself had infinite failures—ugly moods, fogs, glooms, skies of iron, seas of tin. And feeling all this instinctively rather than by a lucid excogitation, he was now for the ideal, for the romantic, for the religious even, for anything that was not real, that shut out the unbeautiful necessity, as those glorious stained windows of cathedrals, blazing with saints, shut out the crude daylight and the raw air of reality, filtering the garish sunlight to that dim religious light in which the soul could see best. Ah, how wisely the poor human soul had fenced itself in against the bleak realities—even as the body had housed itself against the inhospitalities of Nature—painting its windows with beautiful dreams, with an incarnate Love that ruled the world, and an image of immaculate Motherhood. And in a strange hybrid, hazy blend of Catholicism and Hellenism, possible only to an artist who sees things by their sensuous outsides, the Venus de Milo and the Madonna of the Italian masters were to him more akin by beauty than divorced by dogma. In a sense they were one—the highest types of Beauty conceivable by the Pagan and Christian ages, so akin that when Botticelli came to draw Venus, as in his “Nascita di Venere,” his brush fashioned a meek Miltonic Eve, prefiguring the Virgin Mother, while Andrea del Sarto, in his Annunziazone in the “Pitti,” had given the Virgin Mother almost the brooding serenity of a Greek goddess. Ideal Womanhood, Ideal Womanhood, this was what poor Matthew Strang seemed to find in either—ay, and even in Perugino’s “Magdalen,” and the saying of Keats, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” seemed to him to be indeed all that mortals needed to know.
But that Pagan serenity which had produced Greek art could not be his. For him as for the ages the first sensuous joy in beauty was over. And what appealed even more than the Greek marbles to the artist who had set out from his native village with quick blood, worshipper of a beautiful world, was that subtler art which expressed rather the inadequacy than the perfection of life; the wistfulness of a Botticelli Madonna, the unfathomable smile of a Leonardo portrait, the pensive melancholy of Lorenzo di Credi’s “Unknown Youth” in the Uffizi, or the mystic aspiration of the monk in that famous “Concerto di Musica,” and inversely Raphael’s lovelier line than Nature’s, and Michael Angelo’s with its more majestic sweep. He longed with that yearning, with which the boy had looked up to the stars in the midnight forest, for God, for Christ, for Apollo, for some dream of whiteness and beauty, for something that persisted beneath all the purposeless generations of which the Louvre held record in those cumbrous relics of vanished civilization—Egyptian, Phœnician, Syrian, Babylonian, Persian, Chaldean—those broken shafts of pillars that had upheld barbaric temples, those friezes that had adorned the façades of palaces, those blurred monuments perpetuating the victories of forgotten dust, those faded bass-reliefs that had pleased the lustful eyes of nameless kings, enthroned in their gigantic halls, those uncouth torsos of bulls and sphinxes, emblems of a vaster, crueller life. Amid the flux of the centuries the visibles of Art, the invisibles of Religion—were not these the only true Realities?
Such had been Matthew Strang’s thoughts, as in a deep silence he walked through the Louvre with Rosina, a silence that was at its deepest when he responded to her chatter. She hated the slippery parquet and the dull oil-colors under the glazed skylight, preferring the fresh coloring of the copies, though she made fun of the copyists who sat so patiently on their stools. What queer men, what funny, frumpy girls, what strange old ladies! And, look! there was a young woman in widows’ weeds, painting such a cute picture, and—gracious! there was quite a young girl copying a naked man—weren’t they horrid, the French? She liked the attendants’ cocked hats with a dash of gilt, and enjoyed the desultory crowd of perambulating spectators, that ranged from old gentlemen hobbling along on sticks to artisans in red blouses and clayey boots. And wouldn’t Matt come back into the jewelry and china departments, which were really interesting? And wasn’t the heat unbearable? It was her restlessness that made her husband quit this Paris which fascinated him, this beautiful city, with whose artistic activity, divined from the mere architecture of the École des Beaux Arts, he had had no opportunity to get into intimate touch; for he could not even come across Herbert, whom he had rather hoped to find still there, a cicerone to initiate him into the art-coteries of Paris. In Florence, where they went for the winter, Rosina was even more restless. The towered palaces, the Duomo, and the gracious Campaniles, the gardens, the enchanting environs, and all the stock wonders of the place, had none but a superficial interest for her; they were exhausted at first sight; amid the marble calm of colonnades she even regretted the liveliness of the Boulevards. And the climate, too, was worse than that of Paris; her grumblings were perpetual. To pass from the warm piazza or promenade to the biting wind of the narrow streets was not only uncomfortable, but made it a problem how to dress. And, indeed, Matt himself suffered keenly from the cold; though there was a small brass heating apparatus in the centre of the gallery, it scarcely did more than keep his colors from congealing. For he was copying Botticelli’s “Virgin with the Child and Angels.” Yes, Botticelli had become his master—Botticelli, whom at first sight in the National Gallery he had rejected for insufficient draughtsmanship, but all of whose naïve exaggerations, of hands or feet or necks, he now credited to artistic intention, prepared to maintain from loving study of his delicately luminous canvases and his blond ethereal frescos that the Master’s drawing had only repudiated the bonds of the Real in quest of a higher beauty, a more gracious harmony of curves, even as his coloring had refined away that oleaginous quality which a Rubens found in human flesh. To brood over a Madonna of Botticelli or of Filippo Lippi, Matthew Strang would turn from the women of Rubens or the young men of Titian or the children of Velasquez or Rembrandt’s old men. Though at the sight of “Les Glaneurs” of Millet he felt a lurking sympathy in his submerged self, he preferred that morning landscape of Corot, in which bodiceless beauties dance round trees as half-dressed women never did in any period of French history. He found a winter scene of Van Ostade’s none the less charming because the figures were not enveloped, and the lights were untruly set off by bituminous shadows. He was in the mood in which even the gilded rose-nudity of the eighteenth century seemed precious. Amid the infinitude of Art that surrounded him now, Cornpepper’s cocksureness seemed to him as futile as it had already appeared amid the infinity of Nature. And all the Masters were so akin that evolution by revolution seemed less credible than in the smoky atmosphere of Azure Art studios. Modern subject? Had they not all done the contemporary, had the Dutch done anything else? Impressionism? In so far as it meant a free brush-work, was not Rembrandt an Impressionist? Was not Velasquez in his later manner?
His first picture, then, need not be revolutionary in technique, but it must be more imaginative than the bulk of English work in the Academy of his day, more emotional. Photography had reduced realism to absurdity, had proved that Art lay in the transfusion of Nature through the artist’s soul. And the essence of all art was emotion, feeling. The work of Art was but the medium by which the artist passed on his emotion to the spectator, his joy in beauty, his feeling for nature, his sadness, his aspiration, even his view of life. Because emotion could be conveyed by literature and music, there was no reason why these should have the preference in cases where painting was equal to conveying it, too. Without emotion a picture was null and void; technique by itself could give works of craft, never works of Art. On the other hand, to have the artistic emotion without the technique necessary to pass it on to the spectator was to be artistic, but not an artist.
The choice of a subject gave him much harassing hesitation; it brought delicious peace merely to make his final decision amid all the whirl of ideas that pressed upon him. He would found his picture on those beautiful lines in Matthew Arnold’s “Forsaken Merman.”