ancient pictures, the whole doubled by Rosina’s economic administration, was amply sufficient for every rational need—Matthew Strang began at last, without underthought of anything but Art, in this homely environment to which his soul was native, to express his own inmost individuality, to produce faithfully and finely the work it was in him to do.
Solitary, silent, sorrowful, strong; not chattering about his ideas and his aims, indifferent to fame or the voice of posterity, striving for self-approbation and rarely obtaining it, touching and retouching, breaking the rules of the schools in obedience to his own genius, he toiled on in his humble studio, seeking the highest, with no man and no woman to inspire, encourage, or praise. He had been saved from Love and Happiness, and sent back into sympathy with all that works and suffers. And thus the note that had trembled faintly and then died out in his work was struck strong and sure at last—the note of soul. To his accurate science and his genius for the decorative, which are two of the factors of great Art, was now added the spiritual poetry which is the last and rarest. For he was master of his soul at last.
He had absorbed life sufficiently—he had toiled and hungered; he had feasted and made merry; he had sorrowed and endured; he had sinned and suffered; he had known the lust of life and the pride of the eye; he had known Love—the love of the soul and the love of the senses; he had known the heartache of baffled ambition and the dust and ashes of achievement. What he had wanted he had not got; by the time he had got it he had not wanted it; whatever he had set out to do he had not done, and whatever he had done he had not foreseen. And out of all this travail of the soul was born his Art—strong, austere, simple.
In the five or six years since he died to the world he has finished as many big pictures, and has made studies for others, besides a host of minor things. He has not exhibited any of the larger pictures in the Academy; three have been presented quietly to provincial and suburban galleries where the People comes. Only one with some of the smaller things has been sold for money, and this but to appease Rosina; it was one more sacrifice of his individuality to hers. It is true there are expenses for models and materials, and he has now two more children, but it jars upon him to ask money for work that expresses and conceals the tragic secrets of his inmost being. Nor does he care to have his pictures shut away amid the other furniture of luxurious mansions. Still, he has learned enough to know that life cannot be lived ideally. And, moreover, the event has taught him again the contrariety of life; for his eccentricity, leaking out slowly, has enhanced the fame to which he is indifferent, and, aided by a legend of mysterious saturnine seclusion, has raised his market value to such a point that he need only sell an occasional picture. One dealer in particular is anxious to give him his own price for a picture. Matthew Strang will probably part with one to him some day, but he does not know that the dealer is acting for Lady Thornton, the wealthy and celebrated society leader and convert, though he knows and is glad that Eleanor Wyndwood found both happiness and spiritual peace when, a few months after her friend Olive Regan’s marriage to Herbert Strang, that ever-charming and impressionable lady was led to the altar by the handsome and brilliant Sir Gilbert Thornton, and went over with him to Roman Catholicism. With the same earnestness with which she had passed from her native orthodoxy to the Socialism of Gerard Brode, and thence to the spirituality of Dolkovitch, she had slid by a natural transition from the sensuous art atmosphere of Matthew Strang’s world into the sensuous spirituality of Catholicism as soon as his influence had been replaced by the ascendency of another male mind. He was not asked to the wedding, and the invitation to Olive’s, reaching him in the days when the first darkness of isolation was upon him, he had left unanswered.
And just as he has given his Art freely to the world, so, under the inspiration of Tarmigan’s memory, he gives his services freely at Grainger’s and other humble art-schools as encourager of every talent that aspires under discouragement; teaching it to be itself and nothing else, for the artist gives to the world and is not asked for, creating the taste he satisfies, and Art is not Truth nor Beauty, but a revelation of beautiful truth through the individual vision. It is the artist’s reaction to the stimulus of his universe, whether his universe be our common world seen for itself or through antecedent art, or a private world of inward vision: for while the philosophers are quarrelling about abstract truth, the artist answers Pilate’s question through his own personality. The beauty which Matthew Strang’s art reveals, though he experiments in many styles, with unequal results, is mainly tragic. For others the gay, the flippant, the bright—let those from whose temperament these things flow interpret the joyousness and buoyancy and airy grace of existence. For others the empty experimentation in line and color. It is all Art—in the house of Art are many mansions. He has come to the last of the three stages of so many artists, who pass from the fever to do everything, through a period of intolerance for all they cannot do, into a genial acceptance of the good in all schools. But, unassuming as he has always been, he is yet sometimes shaken by righteous indignation when he sees tawdry art—art that is the response to the stimulus of no universe but the artificial studio-universe of models and posings and stage-properties—enthroned and fêted at the banquet of life; and sometimes an unguarded word flashes out before his pupils, but he always repents of his railings, feeling it is his to work, not to judge; to do the one simple thing that his hand findeth to do.
One of his pictures is of a woman looking out to sea with hopeless eyes; there is a mocking glory of sunset in the sky. This is called “The Pain of the World.” The title was due to Olive’s exclamation that night in Devonshire. The figure is his mother’s, come back to him in his own solitude—the image of her standing thus in the asylum at Halifax could not be effaced from his soul; it had to find expression in his Art.