“I have worked but little in oil, and am almost entirely uninstructed, yet these pictures form, whenever I take up a brush; and it isn’t putting it too strong to say that they beg to be painted. They come in color exactly as they want to be put on canvas,—not simply in my mind, but before my eyes, though thin and shadowy.
“One Sunday when rambling in the country I passed an old well, and said to myself, ‘I’ll paint that.’ Instantly I saw a man lying by the well, though no man was there. I painted it that way and put it up in the den I call my studio.
“One day a stranger who came there with one of my friends saw it and took a great fancy to it. He said it was a scene from his memory. The old well was the one at his childhood’s home, and the man was his father, as he had seen him lying in the shade many a time, long ago. The upshot of it was, that he offered me two hundred and fifty dollars for it—it was a little thing—which it is needless to say I accepted. When he went away I thought I ought to faint or do something extraordinary to work off my astonishment.”
“But you didn’t rest on that?”
“No; I went on with other ideals, in little spots of time squeezed out of the odd-jobbery of my daily grind in black and white. I believe that, when we work on our ideals, the very shape of our heads change. My mother says mine is changing, for which I am most grateful, its original shape being like unto an old-fashioned country horse-block.”
“Have you had sympathy in the pursuit of your ideals?” Cartice asked.
“Not always. That was a want I felt for ten years. All that time I hunted for a companion, an artist, who, like myself, loved the country and rural subjects, to paint with me. At last I found one and have him yet. We inspire each other. Together we go to the country on Sundays and make studies. The other artists I encounter in my humble path are so woodeny, so coarse, so worldly that I need patience to suffer them at all, and I never find them companionable. They chaff me and call me a sentimentalist. I don’t care. I believe in sentiment. If I didn’t idealize life and work, I should have to give both up. I would willingly go and live in the humblest little old place in the country and never see a city again, if I could but work on my ideals.”
Cartice was seeing the square-headed little plodder from a new point of view—an inner and spiritual one, and in its beautifying light the square head became symmetrical, the stooping shoulders erect, the pale face attractive, the eyes aflame with vital force, and the bearing that of one conscious of being of value. It was then that she recognized him as one of her own people, from her own planet, and blamed herself for not sooner seeing through the transparent mask that hard environment had made.
She asked him what he thought is to be the fate of those, who, having an ideal, stifle, ignore or slaughter it even, and give their time and energy to the performance of some poor pitiful, paltry work which demands but a tithe of their ability, for the sake of a little money with which to keep out the unwelcome howls of the wolf.
“Look about you and see,” he said, with a contemptuous gesture. “Look at me, a creature slinking in and out of rich publishing houses, hunting crumbs, like the dogs that hung round the rich man’s table, with fear written in every movement, dejection in my spirit, indigence in my garments and weariness in my heart.”