Madeline sank into a chair, crying, and hid her face in her hands.
‘He has asked me to become his wife.’
CHAPTER XXII.—BLANCO SERENA.
Mr. Blanco Serena, the prophet of a new school of painting, the object of which was more closely to reconcile and blend the kindred arts of painting, poetry, and music, occupied a large detached house in South Kensington, whither his worshippers flocked every Sunday, as to the shrine of some patron saint. The walls were embellished with designs from his own pencil, or those of his own friends; the furniture was his own invention, in form as well as colour; the ceilings were cerulean, like the heavens, and like the heavens were studded with golden stars; so that when the rapt creature looked up in contemplation or in inspiration, his vision was rewarded by celestial glimpses. There were no carpets on the floors, but here and there costly rugs were strewn. The house formed a quadrangle, in the centre of which was an open court with a playing fountain, and by the fountain, in fine weather, the prophet and the faithful would lie upon tiger and lion skins, smoking pipes and calumets of strange device.
Serena himself was a middle-aged man, with a high, bald forehead, long apostolic beard, and large brown dreamy eyes. He was a good soul, with the kindest disposition, and the affectations of his profession did not extend to his personal character. The fault lay more in his stars than himself that he had become an eccentric painter. He began merrily, in Bohemian fashion, with a clay pipe in his mouth, painting real landscapes from nature and human beings from the life, and producing compositions noteworthy for fine colour and honest effect. But he discovered early, as many another prophet has discovered, that it did not pay. In an angry moment, one day, disgusted with a picture which he had just completed, he took up his brush and deliberately reversed all the colours of his composition. Where water was blue, he made it vermilion; where boughs were green and golden, he made them purple and cerulean; a white human figure standing by water became an Ethiop, through excess of shadow; and finally, out of sheer devilry, he covered the daffodil sky with layers of pea-green cloud. He had just completed his work, and was scowling at it grimly, when there entered Ponto, the new art critic from Camford. No sooner did Ponto see the mutilated picture than he clasped his hands and raised his eyes rapturously to heaven. ‘At last!’ he cried, and wrung Serena by the hand. ‘Only paint like this, and your fame is sure.’ The ‘Megatherium’ of the following Saturday contained an article by Ponto, entitled, ‘Mr. Blanco Serena’s new painting—a Reverie in Vermilion and Pea-green,’ in which article it was clearly demonstrated, not merely that the painting was one of the masterpieces of the world, but that the painter was the first ‘modern man’ who had dared ‘to give prominence on canvas to evanescent cosmic moods.’ From that day forth the epithets cosmic, august, titanic, supersensuous, sublime, and other adjectives of equal meaning were the especial property of Serena and his imitators; for that imitators came soon goes perhaps without saying, seeing that imitation is so easy. ‘Reveries’ on canvas became the rage; to be non-natural was the fashion. Artists who had once in their innocence strained every nerve to study great models and to copy nature, now tortured ingenuity to represent ‘evanescent cosmic moods’—out of colour, out of drawing, and out of all harmony with anything but the diseased invention of bad painters and the bad critics who urged them on.
Serena, as we have said, was a good fellow, and took his success sensibly. Only to one man in the world did he secretly confess the facts of the case. ‘I know I am a humbug,’ he said to Forster, ‘and that those who praise me are humbugs. I know that I paint worse than I did at twenty, and that, when I die, and my school dies with me, posterity will find me out. This is why, now and then, I follow the true lights of my soul, and paint a true picture; just to keep my work from utterly perishing in Limbo, just to enable some poor soul in the far future to say, “After all, Blanco Serena might, had he chosen, have escaped from being the æsthetic Prig of his period.” But what I am the scribblers and the public have made me. If another man painted a bony woman in yellow gauze, with red hair and pale green eyes, and impossible arms and legs, he would be found out directly: but only let me paint such a figure, and call it “Persephone musing by the waters of Lethe,” or “Memory kneeling by the grave of Hope,” or “Fading away: a Sonata in Sunset tints,” and I am sure at least of Ponto’s praise and the public approval. Well, of all humbugs Art humbug is the worst, though, after all, worse saints have been canonised than Blanco Serena.’
To the studio of Serena, a few days after Madeline’s visit, came Ponto, the art critic, bringing with him a thin, middle-aged. Frenchman, with a coarse mouth and a sinister expression of countenance. The painter, with deft and careless hand, was adding a few touches to the picture of Ophelia.
‘Serena,’ cried Ponto, ‘let me introduce you to M. Auguste de Gavrolles, from Paris—the friend and pupil of the supreme and impeccable Gautier. He is a poet, an ardent worshipper of your genius, and in all matters of art completely sane a cosmic.’