She looked at him with amusement.
'But you are not Vandyke, my dear Loris; you are, at most, Lely or Boucher, and the pearl-powder has got into your brushes a little more than it should have done. You have only one defect as an artist, but it is a capital offence, and you will not outgrow it—you are never natural!'
He was silent from vexation.
He had an exaggerated opinion of his own genius, and saw in himself a mingling of Clouet and Boucher, Leonardo and Largillière, and was often restless and nervous under his sense of her depreciative criticism; but he was very proud of the intimacy he was allowed to enjoy with her, and usually bore her chastisement with a spaniel's humility; a quality rare in him, spoilt and courted darling of high dames as he was.
'If you do take a portrait of that child,' she pursued, pointing to the distant boat, 'you will be utterly unable to portray her as she is; you will never give the sea-stains on her gown, the sea-tan on her face, the rough dull red of that old worn sea-cap. You will idealise her, which with you means that you will make her utterly artificial. She will become a goddess of liberty, and she will look like a maid of honour frisking under a republican disguise to amuse a frisky Court. The simple sea-born creature yonder, rowing through blue water, and thinking of the sale of her oranges or the capture of her fish, will be altogether and forever beyond you. It is always beyond the Lelys and the Bouchers, though it would not have been beyond Vandyke. Do you think you could paint a forest-tree or a field-flower? Not you; your daisy would become a gardenia, and your larch would be a lime on the boulevards.'
'Am I to understand, Madame, that you have suddenly become a patroness of nature? Then surely even I, poor creature of the boulevards though I be, need not despair of becoming natürlich?'
'You mistake,' said Nadine with a little sadness. 'I have lived in a hothouse, but I have always envied those who lived in the open air. Besides, I am not an artist; I am a mere mondaine. I was born in the world as an oyster is in its shallows. But an artist, if he be worthy the name, should abhor the world. He should live and work and think and dream in the open air, and in full contact with nature. Do you suppose Millet could have breathed an hour in your studio with its velvets and tapestries and lacquer work, with its draperies and screens and rugs, and carefully shaded windows? He would have been stifled. Why is nearly all modern work so valueless? Because it is nearly all of it studio-work; work done at high pressure and in an artificial light. Do you think that Michel Angelo could have endured to dwell in Cromwell Road? Or do you think that Murillo or Domenichino would have built themselves an hotel in the Avenue Villiers? Why is Basil Vereschaguin, with all his faults and deformities, original and in a way sublime? Because he works in the open air; in no light tempered otherwise than by the clouds as they pass, or by the leaves as they move.'
'For heaven's sake!' cried Loswa with a gesture of appeal.
She laughed a little.
'Ah, my poor Court poodle, with your pretty tricks and graces!—of course, the very name of our wolf of the forests is terrible to you. But I suppose the Court has made the poodle what he is; I suppose it is as much your duchesses' fault as your own.'