“I’m going to give you a bit of advice,” he had said suddenly. “Remember this, that the opinion of one man, even if he happens to be your master, counts for nothing. The moment you touch any art—painting, sculpture, music, or literature—you’re laying yourself open to criticism, and you’ll find any amount of it adverse. Don’t let it discourage you. If you’ve got the inner conviction that you can do something, forge ahead and do it. Don’t be damped by adverse criticism. If you can learn from it, learn; but don’t let it kill the germ of belief in yourself.”
“But can’t one be mistaken in the belief that one can do something?” Barnabas remembered asking.
“If you are mistaken you’ll find it out for yourself,” the man had replied earnestly. “My dear boy, the men who can’t, and never will, do anything are those who are so cocksure of themselves that they are impervious to sarcasm and every adverse criticism under the sun. It simply doesn’t hurt them. It does hurt us. It touches us on the raw. But we’ve got to go on. You felt like chucking the whole thing just now. I’ll be bound it wasn’t exactly that your self-vanity was wounded, but because you felt that it had been utterly presumptuous of you ever to have attempted to lift your eyes to the Immortal Goddess. My dear boy, she loves men to look at her and worship her, from however far off. It’s those who say they are paying her homage, but who all the time are looking at and worshipping themselves, for whom she has no use. Go on worshipping her. Keep big ideas before you and one day you may get near the foot of her throne. It’s not given to many to touch her knees. But to worship at the foot of the throne is something. Why, even to look at her from afar is worth years of struggle. Saltby keeps one eye on her I grant, but he keeps the other on himself, and it makes him the damned conceited and sarcastic ass he is....”
Barnabas seemed to hear the voice distinctly, to feel the magnetism of the man who had spoken the words so many years ago.
He remembered later in the evening hearing two students speaking of the man.
“Kostolitz is a weird chap,” one had said; “mad as a hatter.”
“Spends half his time like a tramp,” said the other, “going around the country and writing poetry, and the other half in sculpting. Every now and then he takes it into his head to come in here and draw a bit. He says it freshens him up to see beginners on their way to fame.”
Barnabas remembered that Kostolitz had come to him at the end of the morning and had suggested their walking back to Chelsea together. It had been the beginning of their friendship.
The man’s face came persistently before him this evening as he pursued his way towards the World’s End.
Other little speeches of his returned to his mind. “I love colour,” he seemed to hear him saying, “but I can’t work in paints. They aren’t my medium. I want to get to the solid. Give me a lump of clay and I’m happy. It’s nonsense to say there’s only colour in actual coloured things. There is colour in everything—words, music, thoughts—the world’s steeped in colour if you can only see it. Why, man, it may seem odd to you, but people even give me the sense of colour. Perhaps it’s the old Eastern idea of auras, I don’t know. Anyhow, that idea is too mixed up with spiritualism and closed rooms to appeal to me. Give me the open air, the sunshine, flowers, and singing birds. I can believe in fairies, gnomes, the People of the Wind, and the People of the Trees, anything that is of the Spirit of Nature. There they sit together—Nature and Art—the two great goddesses, bless them; and men try to separate Art from Nature. They can’t, man, I tell you they can’t.”