“I need hairdly say I’m glad. Now look ye here. Ye know naything, and a leetle ceevil attention will profit ye.”
He did not pay the slightest heed to Wynne’s sulky rejoinder, but, sucking at his pipe, continued to work on the canvas with great dexterity and skill. Presently he wearied of the occupation, and Wynne came back to his own with a somewhat chastened spirit.
It is an understood thing in the ateliers that every one criticizes every one else, and supports his theories by painting on the canvas he may be discussing. Before the day was out half a dozen different men left their mark on Wynne’s study. The most irritating feature about this practice was the coincidence that they always obliterated some little passage with which he was pleased. To quote one instance, he had succeeded rather happily in the treatment of an eye, imparting to it a sparkle and lustre that gave him profound satisfaction. He could have screamed with rage when the red-headed Alsatian, dipping his thumb in some raw umber, blotted it out, saying sweetly:
“It is not that it is an eye—it is a shadow that it should be.”
A similar experience occurred when, a week later, the great Jean Paul Laurens halted in amazement and disgust before his performance.
“This,” said he, “is a series of trivial incidents, of disjointed details! To we artists the human figure is a mass of light and shade. It is not made up of legs and hands, and breasts, and ears and teeth. No—by the good God, no!”
With which he seized a brush and scrabbled a quantity of flake white over the entire surface.
“Good!” he said. “It is finished.” And passed on to the next.
Thinking the matter over in bed that night Wynne realized he had learnt a great and valuable lesson: breadth of view—visualizing life as a whole. It was knowledge that could be applied to almost everything. Detail merely existed as part of the whole, but the whole was not arrived at by assembling detail.
The same would apply, he perceived, to every art, to business, too, and to life in general. He began to understand how it was possible for people like Wallace and his father to have their place in the scheme of things. They ceased to exist as individual items, brought into undue prominence by enforced propinquity, but became parts of a great machinery whose functions were too mighty to comprehend. These were the shadows which gave tone-value to the high-lights. They were vital and essential, and without them there would be no contrast, no variety, nothing but flat levels—dull and marshy—and never a hill on the horizon showing purple in the morning sun.