“I think,” said I, looking dolefully at my sketch, “that a good deal of the fault must have been in my eyes. I suspect one can’t see colours properly when one is feeling sick and giddy. But the glare of the sun was the worst. I couldn’t tell red from green on my palette, so no wonder the fields and everything else looked all the same colour. And yet what provokes one is the feeling that an artist would have made a sketch of it somehow. The view is really beautiful.”
“And that is really beautiful,” said Eleanor, pointing to the birch group and its background. “And what a mess I have made of it! I wish I’d stuck to pencil. And yet, as you say, an artist would have got a picture out of it.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Jack, who was lying face downwards with my picture spread before him, “I believe that any one who knew the dodges, when he saw that everything looked one pale, yellowish, brownish tint with the glare of the sun, would have boldly taken a weak wash of all the drab-looking colours in his box right over everything, picked out a few stones in his foreground wall, dodged in a few shadows and so on, and made a clever sketch of it. And the same with Eleanor’s. If he had got his birch-trees half as good as hers, and had then seen what a muddle the trees behind were in, I believe he would only have washed in a little blue and grey behind the birches, ‘indicated’ (as our old drawing-master at school calls it) a distant stem or two—and there would have been another clever sketch for you!”
“Another clever falsehood, you mean,” said Clement hotly, “to ruin people’s taste, and encourage idle painters in showy trickery, and make them believe they can improve upon Nature’s colouring.”
“Nature’s colouring varies,” said Jack. “Distant trees often are blue and grey, though these, just now, are of the rankest green.”
Clement replied, Jack responded, Clement retorted, and a fierce art-discussion raged the whole way home.
We were well used to it. Indeed all conversations with us had a tendency to become controversial. Over and above which there was truth in Keziah’s saying, “The young gentlemen argle-bargles fit to deave a body’s head; and dear knows what it’s all about.”
Clement finished a vehement and rather didactic confession of his art-faith as we climbed the steep hill to the Vicarage. The keynote of it was that one ought to draw what he sees, exactly as he sees it; and that every subject has a beauty of its own which he ought to perceive if his perception is not “emasculated by an acquired taste for prettinesses.”
“I shall be in the ‘Household Album’ this evening,” said Jack, in deliberate tones. “My next ambition is the Society of Painters in Water Colours. The subject of my first painting is settled. Three grass fields (haymaking over the day before yesterday). A wall in front of the first field, a hedge in front of the second, a wall in front of the third. A gate in the middle of the wall. A spotted pig in the middle of the field. The sun at its meridian; the pig asleep. Motto, ‘Whatever is, is beautiful.’”
Eleanor and I (in the interests of peace) hastened to change the subject by ridiculing Jack’s complacent conviction that his sketch would be accepted for the “Household Album.”