She was not reading now. The present pause had lasted so long that the fear that Hilda must divine spurred her to the next line guiltily, and she glanced across at Hilda as she read it; but Hilda was asleep. She was glad. She did not want to read any more just yet, or rather she did not want to read any further. She wanted to turn back, and read some of the stanzas again. There was the page that had brought before her eyes so vividly a view of the Little Tester churchyard from the hill. It had made her wonder if he had ever been there when the poplars were blackening against the sky, and all was vague suggestion but the lamplit windows of the cottagers, and the ghostly gravestones of their dead. She had often meant to paint an impression there, and when she had found the page, the desire to do so flamed in her again, fiercer for her admiration of the verse.
If she could have expressed the feelings that the scene aroused in her, the woman would have been a great painter, for she felt deeply and originally, in spite of the local art-school where the tuition—as in almost every English art-school—tended to crush the instinctive feeling of the students. Her brush had provided her only happiness, just as the school—where she had begun to study when she was about fifteen—had provided her only training, but she paid for the hours of happiness with days of dumb despair. She could not stand before this or any other scene, and express clearly what it meant to her, and, baffled, she knew it. She painted very pretty pictures of average merit, poetical things with considerable charm, but further she could not go. She felt that her pictures lied about her almost as basely as her body lied. She tried to believe that they maligned her because she was still young; she reminded herself often that the greatest of our landscape painters had not accomplished the work that made them famous until they were nearly forty—in Constable's case not till later. She did not know that her stumbling-block was that while she had heard a great deal about the virtues of Rossetti, and Burne-Jones, and Ford Madox Brown, a great deal about the eighteenth-century masterpieces and the technique of Reynolds, and Gainsborough, and Romney, she had heard nothing at all about the virtue of going to Nature direct for her impressions—had never been told that her own likings were as valuable as Rembrandt's, or Velazquez', if she would only set them down with sufficient sincerity and courage.
She was one of many—one of the crowd of artists possessing a certain amount of talent and individuality—who are born in England, but whom England cannot teach. And for lack of the guidance that is not to be had in their own country they are for ever stultifying themselves, instead of doing what was promised by their natural gifts. They learn to imitate the work of the painter who has scored the biggest success of the year; to try to imitate the old masters; to treat deliberately a commonplace subject in a commonplace way, with a view to pleasing the Powers of the Royal Academy. What they do not learn is to stand with an open mind, receptive and emotional, in a scene of the every-day life about them, forgetting all the pictures they have seen, and all the juries, and the ignorance of the British picture-buying public, until they know that the thing they are feeling and wanting to convey isn't a mere memory of the work of someone else, but a true impression of life or nature drawn from their inner selves. If Hebe Sorrenford could have studied in Paris for four or five years, she would have been, a better painter, and a happier woman. But she did not realise it. And, as the Professor could not have spared her, it was perhaps as well that she did not.
The servant entered to lay the supper, the pork-pie crowned by parsley on the dish. She said the master had complained that the beer from the new barrel was thick, and inquired if she should draw some for him, or bring up a bottle of stout. Bee replied that her father would rather have the stout.
He came home soon afterwards, a man with mild manners, and a dejected back, who had written several songs that had never been published, and one song that had been successful—under another composer's name. He had also a sanguine temperament, which had survived the corrections of thirty years. A musician who had never learnt to blow his own trumpet, he had failed for want of audacity; and because he was always eager to persuade himself that it was policy to accept injustice rather than face an unpleasant interview, he was inclined, like most men who yield in the wrong places, to be exacting and consequential at home.
"Worn out, father?"
"Eh?" He bent to their caresses, and sank into a chair.
"Worn out?"
He sighed, stretching his feet for slippers.
Bee brought them to him, and moved the footstool.