The Master; a Novel

by Israel Zangwill

“Once she sat with you and me
On a red-gold throne in the heart of the sea,
And the youngest sat on her knee.
She combed its bright hair, and she tended it well,
When down swung the sound of a far-off bell.
She sighed, she look’d up through the clear green sea;
She said: ‘I must go, for my kinsfolk pray
In the little gray church on the shore to-day.
’Twill be Easter-time in the world—ah me!
And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee.’ ”

The subject seemed to him made to his hand. It would enable him to fulfil his young ambitious dream of reconciling the decorative with the idea-picture; the composition should weave a beautiful pattern, and the coloring a scheme of harmony, and yet the picture should make a distinct emotional appeal. A woman, with a soul, throned amid a lower race, yet yearning for the higher spiritual fervors—that was an idea which lent itself beautifully to pictorial expression: a literary idea doubtless, but yet a visual, too, so that there was no need even to label it with the poet’s lines which had suggested it; it should be self-explanatory. And what sensuous glow in the accessories—the clear, green sea-depths, the red-gold throne, the child’s flowing hair! The thought of them was like wine in his veins. He set to work eagerly on a large scale, informed by his contemplation of the Old Masters with big ambitions—to do, not the little lyrics that satisfied contemporary cocksureness, but a great sustained poem.

What pleasures and pains the work brought him! The thrill of conception was deadened by inadequacy of execution, to revive when some charm of color and line flowered under happy accident. He had great joy in doing the heart of the sea with its “deep, divine, dark dayshine”—it was his sympathy with this marine fairy-land that had partly inspired his readiness to do old Coble’s misleading ensign of the shark and the sponge-diver. Around the red-gold throne of the Merman’s bride that stood on the sand-strewn sea-bed the submarine flora bloomed in strange, fantastic arabesques and subtle shades of amber and gray and white and crimson, and through the green translucent water, spent sunbeams quivered and gleamed, and vague tropical fish shot lovely notes of color, and a sea-snake coiled its glittering mail; and there were strange pied amorphous creatures and moss-like corallines and red-branching madrepores and gleaming shells, and mother-o’-pearl touched with purple and azure, yet all strictly subordinated to the two central figures of the composition—the throned woman with her youngest on her knee, which, despite the nudity and the strange accessories, took on a curious likeness to the Madonna and Child. The canvas indeed showed the influence upon him of those wistful Madonnas he had pored over so wistfully; the cold, strange eyes of the golden-haired child were in the imaginative vein of the poem, the form of the throned woman was inspired by merely Pagan ideals of beauty; and yet the yearning in her uplifted eyes for the world of prayer whose sound floated mystically down to her was the same that showed in the eyes of the Holy Mother. But this analogy was not consciously in the artist’s design, though it had doubtless influenced his choice of subject, nor, though he had certainly had in mind to suggest through her the yearning of humanity for a higher world, did he connect his work with the school of Symbolists which was just arising across the Channel, and which was capable of finding in the dominant green of his sea the color-symbol of Resurrection. Even the dead face which he had placed in a corner in the foreground, though it might well seem symbolic of the tragedy lurking amid this sensuous beauty, was in truth only the dead face of his father, and he had put it in less for its symbolic significance or its realistic appositeness than from an uncontrollable desire to have it there, as though thus to dispossess his mind of that ancient haunting image which the continuous thought of the sea had inevitably brought up again. He told himself it was but natural some drowned face should bob ghastly in this submarine paradise, but in reality he felt a morbid craving to put it there, to have something in his picture for himself alone, that no one else in the great wide world could possibly understand to the full.

For the rest the picture cost him infinite trouble, for his genius was an incapacity for not taking infinite pains. The poetry of paint is achieved by the prose of work, and as despite his Romanticism his hankerings for the Real persisted, his ambitious conception entailed much preliminary study, and the setting up in his studio of a little sea-water aquarium, in the construction of which his ancient experience at the Stepney bird-stuffing establishment in making cases of shells with mosses and sea-weeds and coral came in unexpectedly useful. But he could not get a satisfactory model for his principal figure, and curiously enough her left hand gave him more vexation than anything else in this complex composition. He could not settle its pose, scraped out finger after finger with an old sailor’s knife, relic of his mackerel-fishing voyage, specially ground down, painted out the whole hand fourteen times, and at last in despair weakly solved the problem by hiding the hand altogether. Two days later, working on the scales of the sea-snake that basked sinuously at the woman’s feet, he suddenly had a last furious dash at the refractory hand. This time it came right and brought rejoicing. Sometimes he seemed at the mercy of these haphazard inspirations; what came, came, quite irrespective of conscious will and training. “Als ixh Xan” (as I can), the old Flemish motto which Van Eyck put to his work, seemed to him apt for any painter.

When he began “The Merman’s Bride” he was already much more exigent towards himself than in his younger days; self-criticism had checked that fearless execution; by the time he had finished his picture, those very months of steady work, rigorously revised, had raised his ideal higher, so that though the actual picture pretty well corresponded with his first conception, it was still far removed from his later standard. The expression of the woman’s face seemed especially inadequate, and as great actresses do not sit as models, and the artist has to imagine emotional expression, he felt again, despite his Romanticism, that he had missed the subtleties of reality. But every genus of art has to sacrifice something, and sending-in day was drawing swiftly nigh, and he had to lay down his brushes at last, and through his frame-maker despatch the canvas to Burlington House, and await with what composure he could the verdict that should bring him the recognition he had struggled for during such long tedious years. Now that the absorbing task was over, he had time to think of its reward, to dwell on the thought of recognition, of Fame, the one thing on earth that still loomed before him, enshrouded in vague, misty splendors. In a world of illusions, this was the solid happiness it might yet be his to grasp.

This last illusion was not destined to be dissipated yet awhile. He was sitting at the breakfast-table when he received a blue card inviting him to take back his picture. Burning with revolt and despair, he had to strive to appear calm, what time Rosina was unfolding a tale of woe concerning the maid-of-all-work, whom she had detected throwing away half-burned coals into the dust-hole. That, she reiterated monotonously, explained the mysteriously rapid disappearance of the coals—over a ton since quarter-day. An investigation of the dust-hole had revealed a veritable coal-mine. It was one of the most curious characteristics of Rosina that, with all her hardness, she flinched mentally before her servants, pouring out her grievances against them when they were out of ear-shot, so that her husband suffered vicariously for their sins of omission or commission. Usually he listened to her silently with the courteous deference he would have shown a guest, never provoked to an angry retort save by her absurd objections to his models. He had abandoned as hopeless the effort to unite their souls. But to-day he had no option but to cap her tragic narrative by telling her of his disappointment. The news excited her not to sympathy with his aspersed art, but to reproachful alarm for his pecuniary future.

This was the last straw. He might have stood out against the Academy, exhibiting elsewhere, and gradually building up an outside reputation; but the pecuniary independence to enable him to do this, which had been the main motive of his marriage, was the very thing that he now saw he must abandon. In his secret paroxysms of resentment—more against himself than against her—it became increasingly plain to him that he could not live on her money; that were intolerable to his reawakened manhood. He must make a financial success on his own account; he must become independent of her at any cost to Art. His entire preconception of his future had broken down, his marriage a failure from the financial point of view as from every other. Instead of having emancipated himself from the necessity of a monetary success, he had made life impossible without it. Well, he would compromise; he would recoil to leap the better; he would do what the public wanted, and then, having secured its attention, he would do what he wanted.

He went to the Academy and to the Grosvenor Gallery, he studied the most popular pictures of his day, and in a couple of large canvases—one domestic, the other Biblical—set himself to outdo them in anecdotage and obviousness of technique.

In a passion of irony he half parodied his own picture of “The Merman’s Bride” in an idyllic interior called “Motherhood,” representing a mother holding up a little girl, who in her turn nursed a doll. Rosina sat for this to save expense, her own little girl being now weaned. The other picture was a “Vashti,” and for the repudiated queen did Rosina pose likewise, and with unwonted interest in her husband’s work.

Both pictures were cleverly painted, for Matthew Strang strove to atone for his lack of interest in his subjects by painful impeccability of technique, and to Rosina’s joy both won acceptance from the Hanging Committee, though at the eleventh hour—on the Saturday night before Varnishing Day—husband and wife were alike disappointed to receive an intimation that, through lack of space, only the smaller—“Motherhood”—could be hung.