“Shall you be at the Academy soirée?” he asked Trapp, to turn the conversation.
“No, I don’t care for crowds,” replied the realistic novelist.
The conversation rambled on. The composer drifted away, and a full-fledged Academician took his place—an elderly, dandified figure with a languid drawl, an aristocratic manner caught from his sitters, and a shoulder-shrugging contempt for Continental Art; in despite of which Matthew Strang protested mildly against the bad hanging at Burlington House of a portrait by an eminent Frenchman. Cornpepper talked of a sale at Christie’s at which most of the pictures had fetched lower prices than was given for them by their last owners.
“It’s all a spec’,” said Herbert; “there’s no such thing as a fixed value in a work of art. Everything depends on the artist’s pose. The more the buyer gives for a picture the more he likes it. It’s a game of brag. Set up a fine establishment—the dealer will pay. My old governor was a good deal taken in by pretentious humbugs with pals in the press.” As the Academician’s own establishment was notoriously finer than his pictures—a fact of which the wandering Herbert was ignorant—Matthew Strang hastened to speak of Tarmigan, who had been recalled to memory by the catalogue of the aforesaid sale. “I’m afraid he’s gone under, poor fellow,” he said. “I’ve tried to come across him, but he was always a mysterious person.”
But Cornpepper continued to talk of the sale, of the fluctuations of prices; of the impoverished condition of the market, so menacing to young artists who had set up fashionable establishments on the strength of their first sales; of the potentialities of America, that yet undiscovered continent, till all the tide of secret bitterness welled up in a flood from the depths of Matthew Strang’s soul. Money! Money! Money! He had never really escaped from it. What a mirage Art was! Even success only brought the same preoccupations with prices, it was all the old sordidness over again on a higher plane. The ring of the gold was the eternal undertone, bringing discord into every harmony. With a public ignorant of what Art meant, conceiving it as something rigid like science, not as the expression of the temperament, technique, and vision of individual genius; with a public craving for pictorial platitudes; Art could not be, and was not, produced, save by a martyr here and there. Everywhere the counting of pieces and the shuffling of bank-notes! The complacent Academician irritated him; he was tired of reading of his marble halls, the vassals and serfs at his side, his garden parties, his Belgravian palace erected on the ruins of a forgotten bankruptcy. The fumes of expensive wines and cigars gave him a momentary vertigo.
“For God’s sake, stop talking shop!” he burst out suddenly.
The astonished Cornpepper let his eye-glass fall.
“Have you gone crazy, Strang?” he asked, witheringly. “What do you join an artists’ club for, if you don’t want to talk shop? Strikes me you’d better get yourself put up for the Commercial Travellers’ Union.”
“That’s what we are,” retorted Matthew Strang.
The Scotch landscape-painter pacified them by proposing a game of “shell-out,” and Herbert eagerly seconding the proposal it was carried nem. con., and the group mounted to the billiard-room, where Matthew Strang won half a crown before he went off to his nocturnal parties, leaving his cousin still renewing with zest his olden experience of the lighter side of British Art.