'I am sorry to say,' I replied, 'that my Gypsy wanderings are again answerable for my shortcomings. I have not yet seen your picture. When I do see it I—'
'Not seen "Faith and Love" and the equally wonderful predella at the foot of it!' he exclaimed incredulously. 'Ah, but you have been living among the Gypsies. It is the greatest picture of the modern world; for, Mr. Aylwin, it renders in Art the inevitable attitude of its own time and country towards the unseen world, and renders it as completely as did the masterpiece of Polygnotus in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi—as completely as did the wonderful frescoes of Andrea Orcagna on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa.'
'And you attribute your success to the inspiration you derived from my father's hook?'
'To that and to the spirit of Mary Wilderspin in heaven.'
'Then you are a Spiritualist?'
'I am an Aylwinian, the opposite (need I say?) of a Darwinian.'
'Of the school of Blake, perhaps?' I asked.
'Of the school of Blake? No. He was on the right road; but he was a writer of verses! Art is a jealous mistress, Mr. Aylwin: the painter who rhymes is lost. Even the master himself is so much the weaker by every verse he has written. I never could make a rhyme in my life, and have faithfully shunned printer's ink, the black blight of the painter. I am my own school; the school of the spirit world.'
'I am very curious,' I said, 'to know in what way my father and the spirits can have inspired a great painter. Of the vignette I may claim to know something. Of the spirits as artists I have of course no knowledge, but as regards my father, he, I am certain, could hardly have told a Raphael from a chromolithograph copy. He was, in spite of that same vignette, most ignorant of art. Raxton Hall possesses nothing but family portraits.'