“Why do you never put people into your pictures?” Mrs. Elles enquired. “I confess I am like Farmer Ward; I should like it better, too!”
“Somehow, I never care much for the human interest in landscape.”
“Or in life either?” Mrs. Elles hazarded. It was the same remark she had made to Egidia.
“I don’t know anything about that,” he replied, distantly, “but I think the introduction of figures is always somewhat of an insult to landscape. One ought to be able to make a transcript of nature interesting without the adventitious aid of figures, it seems to me, though certainly Turner had no such theory. There is generally a boy and a kite, or a man and a dog in the foreground of his pictures. There is often a suggestion of cruelty, of torture of animals that I could wish away, for instance——”
“Yes, you do hate people!” Mrs. Elles insisted, unconsciously cutting short his little dissertation on his idol, Turner, far too impersonal in its application to interest her. “You have all the instincts of a recluse, although you force yourself to be civil to bores when they come your way. Tell me, didn’t you hate me when I first came?”
“You took me by storm rather,” he admitted. “You were so rapid in your tactics that you didn’t even give me time to harden my heart against you. Of course I am speaking of you as a mere tourist, as I thought you were the first time I saw you. And I was rather rude to you at first?”
“Very,” she said. “You did your best to put me off the inn, but you are not sorry now that you failed, are you?”
“Of course I am not!” he replied, cordially, and it was quite the nicest and most encouraging thing he had ever said to her.
“It seems to me that I have frightened away your other bore—the Vicar,” she said, carelessly. “He never comes here, and she has never called on me, as you said she would. Not that I think you mind not seeing anyone! Yes, you are an arrant hermit at heart—Shelley must have meant you when he wrote Alastor—the Spirit of Solitude. I was reading that the other day in your Shelley; I am studying Shelley, now.”
“I admit that my instincts are unsociable,” he said, with his brush between his teeth. “I don’t see how I am to help it. The conditions of a landscape painter’s life make it necessarily a very solitary and inhuman one. You see I am in the country for the greater part of the year, and I never tell anyone where I go. I call my pictures by fanciful titles, so as not to have to put the name of the place in the catalogues. It is absurd, but then it happens to be the only way I can work. I generally don’t open my lips from June to November, at least not to talk to persons of culture! The other sort doesn’t matter.”