She left the church abruptly, preferring the placid sunny square where little children were playing, to the damp church and the high function of criticism. She could not send her companion away; so the two strolled aimlessly through the stone passages, echoing faintly with half-frozen life, out to the bright river bank. Even the brilliant sunshine of the February sky gave no comforting warmth. Erard said the sun appeared for the effect only. The Arno, too, flowed muddy and sullen, sweeping debris down from old mountain villages. The elements of royal splendour, to which she had once responded tremulously, lay before her eye, but she was not stirred. She thought.
Later, when they were drinking their tea in the villa, Mrs. Wilbur let fall the thoughts simmering in her mind. Erard was doctoring one of her architectural sketches, while she watched his skilful hand.
“A lot of your things seemed to me so promising,” she mused.
“‘Promising’—disgusting word,” Erard snapped. “Youth, a few years between puberty and manhood, is filled with deceptive lights, which are taken often for true fires. The period of physical eruption past, the lights fade from the mental horizon; the ambitious, imaginative youth, if he has anything in him, becomes a scholar or a dilettante.”
Mrs. Wilbur moved uncomfortably. What her woman’s soul hated to feel was that Erard’s specifically original and creative powers had never been great and were fated to decline steadily, growing each year more colourless. It was a slow, inevitable process which he was powerless to arrest.
“It’s childish to think there is any spiritual mystery in the toy,” Erard continued. “The world, too, has grown from puberty to a staid maturity where it cares first for a fact. In hours of relaxation, it sighs for the dream of its unsettled years; but give it a poet and it laughs at his boyishness—until he is dead.”
“That is hateful,” she flung these words into the crackling fire which lighted the lofty room sombrely.
“Only because you invest the artist with a romantic halo,” Erard insisted. “I have found my work absorbing and fruitful. I have been successful in it, and am encouraged to prosecute my ideas and publish the results. It makes little difference by what wicket-gate we approach the field: the problems are the same. And the greatest note of our day is creative criticism,” he rose authoritatively at these words,—a phrase which was frequently on his lips. “Your artist should be busy over his technique. So far as intellect goes, he is often a dumb beast. We deal with ideas. We extract the ideas, press out the sensations peculiar to his art, and we are officiating priests between him and the mob.”
Mrs. Wilbur remained silent, unappeased, and opening the piano she struck a few chords, drawing out a kind of sad, tinkling music.
Ah! there was a difference between great criticism and even puny art. If not in the usefulness of the work, in the man behind the imagined work, and the soul to whom he spoke! There was a halo about the creator of new notes of loveliness. She had been fired by the picture of a man struggling with adversity for the chance to announce himself, thrusting himself with Napoleonic egotism towards his great work that should justify him and his disciples before the world. But—little textbooks on art, essays, reviews, even this book which was to make a sensation from Berlin to Chicago—that was hardly a justification. Others did as much without all this stress and strain. And even if not done, the world went on quite wise enough without a little more talk about European culture.