The Master; a Novel

by Israel Zangwill

As he worked at it, with the brutal aloofness of the artist, studying lights and shadows, values and effects, gradations and tones, he wondered whether the artist were a cold-blooded monster, or a divinely appointed alchemist sent to transmute the dross of the world’s pain to the gold of Art for the world’s pleasure; a magician to cover up the rawness of life, as kindly Nature covers up the naked earth with grass, or throws the purple light of dream over all that is dead—over the centuries that are past or our youth that is gone; a Redeemer, whose beautiful perception of pathos and tragedy robs the grave of its victory, and plucks Death of its sting, so that no man suffereth or travaileth without contributing to the raw stuff of life of which Art is woven by the souls dowered with the pangs and privileges of Over-Consciousness. Each man, it sometimes seemed to him, dimly, had to pay so much in sorrow and pain; and in return for that he drew from the common human fund the comprehension of life and the consolation of Art, new sympathies and new delights, music and books and pictures, that only lived through the rich variety of human destinies; mystic atmospheres and minor scales, meaningless to souls that had not suffered or inherited the capacity to suffer. Some—generally the stupid—paid little in pain and sorrow; and some—as in his own case—much. But so long as the account showed a balance to the general good, it was not for the soul that was sacrificed to complain. It was, perhaps, even a privilege to subserve the common good. Life was so arranged that virtue could not be sure of personal reward, and this uncertainty was just what made virtue possible. Under no other scheme of things could the soul enjoy the privilege of virtue. To have suffered, as he himself had done, by the institution of marriage, both as child and husband; to have been a victim to the general laws which safeguard human society; to have been cut in two by the flaming swords of the cherubim, which turn every way to keep the way of the Tree of Life—all this did not, he thought, give him the right to blaspheme existence. And the artist at least extracted a soul of good from all things evil.

Some such reflections—not clear, but all confused and blurred, for he was no syllogism-building philosopher, but an artist whose profoundest thought sprang always from the concrete image before him—came to him again when he was working at his famous picture “The Persecutors,” inspired by an episode in Billy’s life, though Billy does not know. It is simply children tormenting an old man. The old man is one of the world’s wrecks; the children know not what they do. But the pathos of the picture is overwhelming; it purifies by pity and terror. This is the profit to the world of Billy’s life.

Matthew Strang knows, with the same secret assurance that sent him out to fight, and strengthened him in the long struggle, that this picture will live, that the gods have answered his boyish prayer for immortality. But at moments when Billy is moping or in pain, or when the artist foresees the gabble of magazines and drawing-rooms about his work, the chatter of fashionable parrots, and the analysis of his “second manner” by glib, comfortable critics, he wonders whether the picture or the immortality is worth the price.

But, stronger than those driven by their Over-Consciousness to express in artistic shapes the futility of life, he does not dwell eternally on the tears of things; and his picture simply entitled “A Woman” is perhaps his masterpiece. For when he painted it that sunrise in Paris was still vivid to him, and the light in Ruth Hailey’s eyes, and that fire of love in Eleanor Wyndwood’s; these things were in the eternal order, too, as truly as the ugliness and the sordid realities. The simplest human life was packed with marvels of sensation and emotion, haloed with dreams and divine illusions. To have been a child, to have sung and danced, to have eaten and played, to have seen woods and waters, to have grown to youth and to manhood, to have dreamed and aspired, to have labored and hoped—all this happiness had been his while he was looking for happiness, just as Art had been his in Nova Scotia, while he had been struggling to get to it in England.

And so to-day he yearns to paint the poetry of the Real—not with the false romantic glamour which had witched his youth, though even his youth had had a hankering after the Real, just as his maturity retains a love for the mystic. That gilded unreality to which his Art would have gravitated, had he found happiness with the sentimental Eleanor in her atmosphere of fashion, will be replaced by the beauty that even when mystic is based on Truth. He needed no woman’s inspiration, nor the stimulus of cultured cliques. Alone he faces the realities of life and death without intervening veils of charming illusion, no longer craving to filter the honest sunlight through stained cathedral windows or to tarnish the simplicity of the grave with monumental angels. Aspiring now to paint London, he wanders through the gray streets, as in his days of hunger, but now the grotesque figures no longer seem outside the realm of serious Art, or mere picturesque arrangements of line and color. To his purged vision, that still lacks humor, they touch the mysteries and the infinities, passing and disappearing like ghosts on a planet of dream: solitude has brought him a sense of the universal life from which they flow, and he fancies the function of Art should be to show the whole in every part, the universal through the particular. And so he longs to paint the beauty that lies unseen of grosser eyes, the poetry of mean streets and every-day figures, to enrich and hallow life by revealing some sweep of a great principle that purifies and atones.

In “The Old Maid” he has painted the portrait of “Aunt Clara” with Davie on her knee, revealing the wistful, imprisoned, maternal instinct he detected one day in her sunken eyes as she fondled his little Davie. What makes this presentation of ugliness Art is not merely the breathing brush-work, but the beauty of his own pity which the artist has added to the Nature he copied. With the falsely aristocratic in Art or life he has lost sympathy: to him to be honest and faithful is to belong to the only aristocracy in the world—and the smallest. Sometimes he dreams of some great Common Art—for all men, like the sky and the air, which should somehow soften life for all. And dreaming thus he somewhat frets against the many limitations of his own Art—as once in his callow boyhood when he set out to write that dime novel—and against its lapsed influence in modern life, wishing rather he had been a great poet or a great musician. Only music and poetry, he feared while toiling at the “Old Maid,” could express and inspire modern life; the impulse that had raised the cathedral had been transformed into the impulse that built the grand hotel, fitted throughout with electrical conveniences; in the visible arts landscape and portraiture alone seemed to find response from the modern mind, the one by its revelation of the beauty of the world, the other by its increasing subtlety of psychological insight. Painting had begun with religion, religion had led to technique, then religion had drifted away from painting, and then technique had become a religion. But technique ought not to be thought of separately except by the student; to the artist the spiritual and the material came as one conception, as metre comes with the poet’s thought. The spirit must be brought back to painting—this modern accuracy of tones and forms was but the channel for it. But it could no longer be conveyed through the simple images of a popular creed to which all men vibrated: to-day there was no such common chord for the artist to touch. Even this picture of “The Old Maid” might be unintelligible without its title, and risked denunciation as literary. And the greatest picture could be seen by but few.

But repining is useless; there is only one thing he can do, and he must do it—a small thing in the span of the cosmos and the sweep of the ages, but to be done ere he goes down to the kindred dust. But before death comes he has doubtless other things to suffer—all these spiritual agonies have seared the body in which early privations and sickness had already left the seeds of premature infirmity. His children are growing up, too, bringing new fears and problems.

And yet his life is not all unhappy—work is his anodyne, and there is an inner peace in the daily pain, because it is the pain that his soul has chosen, in willing slavery to its own yoke.

But life is too long for ideals; the unending procession of the days depresses the finest enthusiasm. Sometimes when the domestic horizon is dark, or when his body is racked with pain, he rebels against the rôle thrust upon him in the world’s workshop, and against the fate that mocked at his free-will, and made of him a voluntary instrument for the happiness of Rosina and Herbert, turning his every action to undreamed-of issues; and then he longs for the life that he had found so hollow, the life of gay talk, and rustling dresses, and wine, and woman, and song. And in such moments as these—when the natural human instinct for happiness, yearning sunward, breaks through all the strata of laborious philosophy and experience—he remembers that men call him “The Master,” and then he seems to hear the sardonic laughter of Mad Peggy, as he asks himself what Master he has followed in his sacrifice, or what Master, working imperturbably, moulds human life at his ironic, inscrutable will.