The Master; a Novel

by Israel Zangwill

Matt Strang’s foot had touched England at last. Two long, monotonous years of steadfast endurance, self-sacrifice, and sordid economies—two years of portrait and sign painting, interrupted by spells of wagon-striping at two and a half dollars a day, had again given him the mastery of three hundred dollars, despite his despatch of five dollars a week to Abner Preep, and of a final subsidy of one hundred dollars to bridge over the time till he should have a footing in England. Gradually the cloud of despondency had rolled off, the spring-time of life and aspiration would not be denied, and though the pity and terror of his mother’s tragedy had tamed his high spirit and snapped the springs of buoyancy, the passion for painting returned with an intensity that dulled him to every appeal of the blood in his veins; and with it a haunting fear that he could never live to see London or his artist uncle, that he would die in the flower of his youth, all his possibilities latent. So impatient was he to give this fear the lie that he suffered a vexatious loss through his hurry to realize the bills and the goods in which his art had too often found payment. When the steamer floundered into a field of ice off Newfoundland, his semi-superstitious feeling wellnigh amounted to a quiet conviction that he would be shipwrecked in sight of port, the three hundred dollars serving but to sink him deeper.

Without stopping in Southampton to tempt Providence, he went straight on to London, every vein in him pulsing with feverish anticipations of mysterious splendors. The engine panted in answering exultation, and the rattle of the carriages was a rhythmic song of triumph. At last he was approaching the city of his dreams—the mighty capital of culture and civilization, where Art was loved and taught and honored. For some days now his whole being had been set in this key.

He sat at the window, gazing eagerly at the sunless landscapes that raced past him. Gradually he became aware of the approach of the monstrous city. Fields were interrupted by houses; later, houses were interrupted by fields; then the rural touches grew fewer and fewer, and at last he sped under a leaden sky amid appalling, endless, everlasting perspectives of chimney-pots and sooty tiles, and dingy houses and dead walls and vomiting columns and gasworks and blank-faced factories reeking with oppressive odors—on and on and on, as amid the infinities of a mean Inferno, whirring past geometrical rows of murky backyards with dust-bins and clothes-lines, and fleeting glimpses of grimy women and shock-headed children and slouching men, thundering over bridges that spanned gray streets relieved by motley traffic and advertisement hoardings, and flashing past gaunt mansions of poverty—bald structures with peeling fronts and bleared windows. There was a sombre impressiveness in the manifold frowziness, the squalid monotony; it was the sublime of the sordid. Fresh as Matt was from the immensities of sea and sky, the shabbiness of the spectacle caught at his throat; he thought chokingly of the unnumbered, unnoticed existences dragging dismally along within those bleak, congested barracks.

What had all this to do with Art? The glow of his blood died away, to be rekindled only by the seething streets into which he emerged from the clangorous maze of Waterloo Station; the throb of tumultuous life that beat as a drum and stirred the blood as a trumpet. Yet he had not come up to conquer London, but to sit at its feet. His bitter experience of life had destroyed every vestige of cocksureness, almost of confidence, leaving him shy and sometimes appalled at his own daring, as he realized the possibilities of self-delusion. He knew that fame and money were the guerdons of Art, but these were only indirectly in his mind. If they sometimes flashed to his heart in intoxicating instants of secret hope, he was too full of the consciousness of his disadvantages and imperfections to think much of anything beyond getting the necessary training. Far down the vista of thought and years lay this rosy rim of splendor, a faint haze dimly discerned, but the joy of learning and practising his art was the essence of his yearning. And yet there were moments, like this of feeling London under his foot for the first time, when a consciousness of power welled up in his soul—a sense of overflowing energy and immovable purpose that lifted him high above the crowd of shadows.

Escaping the touts and cabmen, he carried his valise across a great noiseful bridge to the nearest inexpensive-looking hotel, intending to secure a base of operations from which to reconnoitre London before looking up his uncle. But though he was at once booked for a room, the genteel air of the place, with its well-dressed customers and white-tied waiters, terrified him with the prevision of a portentous bill. He would have backed out at once had he dared, but, he thought, now that he was in for it, he would give it a week’s trial. He took only his breakfasts there, however, though the unnatural hour at which he took them made him an object of suspicion. He seemed always on the point of catching an early train. His other meals were taken at those modest restaurants where twopence is not a tip, but the price of a dish, and the menu is cut up into slips and pasted across the shop-window.

His first visit on the day of his arrival was to the National Gallery, not only to fulfil a cherished dream, but to see his uncle’s pictures, to talk of which might smooth the meeting. But he could nowhere come across the works of Matthew Strang, and a catalogue he could not afford; and he soon forgot the unseen pictures in the emotions excited by the seen, which plunged him into alternate heats of delight and chills of despair.

Despair alone possessed him at first in his passage through the Florentine and Sienese rooms. The symbolic figures of Catholicism had scant appeal for a soul which in its emergence from Puritan swaddlings had not opened out to mediævalism, and the strange draughtsmanship blinded him to everything else. If Margaritone or even Botticelli was Art, then his ideas must be even cruder than he had feared. He was relieved to find, as he continued his progress, that it must be the Madonnas that were crude, for he was apparently following the evolution of Art. But the sense of his own superior technique was brief—despair came back by another route. Before the later masters he was reduced to a worshipper, thrilled to tears. And, somewhat to his own astonishment, it was not only the poetic and imaginative that compelled this religious ecstasy; his soul was astrain for high vision, yet it was seized at once by Moroni’s “Portrait of a Tailor,” and by the exquisite modelling—though he did not know the word for it—of the head in his “Portrait of an Ecclesiastic.” To the young Nova Scotian, who had so chafed at having to paint uncouth farmers, it was an illumination to see how in the hands of a Teniers, or, above all, a Rembrandt, the commonplace could be transfigured by force of technique and sympathy. And yet he surrendered more willingly to the romantic, held by the later “Philip the Fourth” of Velasquez, as much for its truculent kingly theme as for the triumphantly subtle coloring, which got the effects of modelling almost without the aid of shadows. And the fever of inspiration and mastery, the sense of flowing paint which pervaded and animated the portrait of the Admiral, was the more entrancing because of the romantic figure of the Spanish sailor; while beside Rembrandt’s “Jewish Merchant,” with its haunting suggestion of suffering and the East, even the fine Vandyke, its neighbor, seemed to lose in poetry.

The brilliant and seizing qualities had his first vote; luminosity of color, richness of handling, grip of composition—all that leaped to the eye. Being alone, he had the courage of his first impressions; and having always been alone, he had the broadness that is clipped by school. The beautiful sense of form and landscape in Titian’s “Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen” captivated him, though for subject he preferred the “Bacchus and Ariadne.” He was equally for Murillo’s “St. John and the Lamb,” and for Andrea del Sarto’s portrait of himself; for Palma’s Christ-like “Portrait of a Painter.” He wondered wistfully whence Bassano’s “Good Samaritan” took the glow of its color, or Greuze’s “Head of a Girl” its pathetic grace, and he was as struck by the fine personal, if sometimes unsure, touch of Gainsborough as by the vigorous handling and extraordinary painting force of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose children alone he found unreservedly delicious.

Amid many sound if superficial judgments were many crude admirations and condemnations, destined to undergo almost annual revision. At the present stage of his growth, for example, the charming Correggio was his ideal of an artist—to wit, a skilful painter, suffusing poetical themes with poetical feeling.

Subject counted for him: a sympathetic theme seemed to him of the essence of Art.