Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  “My dear fellow, you surely don’t think that originality is gained by such simple means as painting a figure against a very red curtain. I tell you, you have improved, but between learning certain rules of drawing and developing originality, I assure you there is a difference.”

  “But tell me what it is you dislike in the picture,” pleaded Lewis, who had expected that his red curtain, in daring, would have taken the wind out of Thompson’s sails.

  “To begin with,” answered Thompson, “does it not occur to you that a woman about to dance doesn’t stand in that academical pose?”

  Lewis was very much disheartened; and, in despair, he asked Harding what he thought.

  The novelist professed to like the picture, but he soon began to talk of Mrs. Bentham, whom he appeared to think of much more importance than the Salome. He seemed anxious to know all about the sojourn in France.

  The conversation then turned on women, and Harding encouraged Lewis to recount his experiences.

  Thompson was bored; but knowing that Harding was studying Lewis, as a chemist might a combination of gases, he waited patiently till the conversation changed, and Lewis asked again, what he should do with the Salome.

  “Would you advise me to alter the pose of the legs?” he asked, piteously.

  “No, I don’t know that I would do that,” replied Thompson, who had at last succeeded in getting to the door. “Try to model it a little more freely; try to draw by the character, not by the masses.”

  Lewis looked at his Salome, and wondered how he could model it more freely, then if it would be possible to change the legs so as to show that she was going to dance: the whole afternoon he remained a prey to the most dreadful inquietude.

  Thompson’s counsels were of no use to him, they merely made him discontented with his work, and did not help him to do better; and before he had seen the Scotchman half-a-dozen times, he hated his picture.

  Thinking the painting too smooth, he set to work to re-do it; but in a couple of days he had lost all the modelling. The pretty legs which had so pleased him now put him into such a rage that it was with difficulty he restrained himself from kicking the canvas through. In vain he tried different kinds of execution; he painted from nature broadly, and tried to finish a piece at a time. Then he made drawings, sent his model away, and tried to copy them.

  He was like a starving man led and tempted by a piece of meat that an invisible hand would not let him grasp. Often he threw down his palette, and holding his head between his hands, tried to solve the problem. He could draw a face; he could catch the movement of a figure; he could model it well enough, and yet — and yet — there was something wanted. He tried to think of new subjects, new effects, but it was of no use; his work ever remained the same, vacant, empty, common-place — he could not create.

  Every generation sees the same phenomenon repeated, sees the impotent struggling for the right of creation, which nature has denied them.

  In art, an original talent takes the place of the queen bee in a hive. But this simile, although a true one, is an incomplete one; for the great artist, although the king, is but the sublime child of those whom he governs; he is, in a word, the resume of the imperfect aspirations which preceded, which surround him; he is born in the barren womb of failure and suckled on the tears of impotence.

  Thompson was this ideal, this resume of the spirit of his time, and his influence was extending over all; a life-giving medicine to the strong, a death-dealing poison to the weak. Lewis was an example of the latter effect, Holt, who had lately joined the ranks of “The modems,” of the former; for without having the great original talent of his master, he was strong enough to be able to reproduce what came to him at second hand, in a form sufficiently altered to be free of the plague spot of plagiarism. But although “The moderns” were now beginning to be talked of, none as yet, not even Thompson, had succeeded in gaining the ear of the general public. He and Holt had a few patrons who believed in them, the others lived poorly and wretchedly, selling their pictures occasionally, principally to old Bendish, without whom they would all have probably long ago starved.

  Frazer, who was encumbered with five children and a wife, lived in a garret, unable to prostitute his talent to the public taste.

  Howell had unfortunately blown his brains out in despair.

  Again Lewis fell under the influence of these enthusiasts; again he fell a victim to that most terrible of maladies, the love of art for art; again he suffered the pain of the imperious want to translate his thoughts, his visions, his dreams; again he felt come over him the terrible shuddering of art, the emotion of the subject found, of the scene which became clear. He suffered all the pains of this terrible child-bearing without the supreme happiness of deliverance. His pains were infinite but fruitless, for the impalpable something which tempted, tortured him, faded into nothing when he attempted to reduce the unapparent reality into apparent pictures.

  One day, as he saw a dream vanishing under his hands, he threw down his brushes, and in despair went to see Thompson, to seek for advice and encouragement Thompson was at work on the portrait of a lady: she wore a large hat, and was placed against a light brown Venetian blind: Lewis looked at it with despair in his heart. There was nothing forced, nothing eccentric about it; it did not show any desire on the part of the painter to exaggerate; it had evidently come to him quite naturally, and it was obviously a new art, an art that was the outcome of the life and thought of to-day.

  It was drawn with the wonderful simplicity of a virgin by Raphael; the face was modelled with a mere nothing. Lewis looked at it again and again: he could not understand how it was done.

  “What did you mean the other day,” he said, “when you told me to draw by the character and not by the masses?”

  “Did they not tell you at the ‘Beaux-Arts’ to draw the large masses of shadow, to decompose your picture, as it were, into so many pieces, and to construct it in that way?”

  “Yes, they did; but what’s the harm of that?”

  “Only this, that it makes them draw all alike. No matter how different the artistic temperament, after a couple of years in the schools, every student produces the same work. The manual dexterity may vary a little, but their impression is always the same. The clavicle is in the right place; the figure is seven heads high, ergo, the people think it good drawing. Oh! I know their theories. What is it they say about the legs? ‘Cette jambe ne porte pas,’ isn’t that it?”

  That night Lewis could not sleep, thinking of Thompson’s portrait, and wondering how he could do something like it. He was out of bed at eight, he worked till five; then rubbed out all he had done, and walked about the streets wearied. Day after day the same struggle was continued. He turned upon his thoughts, but he felt as if he were bound and could not get free. Thompson had struck him through with an artistic aspiration, and he writhed on it like an insect on a pin For two months this continued, till in despair, remembering that, after all, what Thompson did found but little favour with the picture dealers, he set to work to produce work in his own style. But whether it was he had lost his hand, or whether it was that he knew more now than before, he could not say, but it appeared to him that he painted worse now than ever. Still he managed to finish a head and a small picture, then he invited the dealers to come and see them; some came but none would buy. This was the culminating point of all, for it added to the misery of desire, the fear of not being able to succeed even in the humbler walks of art In despair he again sought the consolation of “The moderns.” He frequented|more than ever Thompson’s studio. There he met Frazer, who still continued to paint landscapes whose austere character and unconventional handling of pigment rendered them almost unsaleable.

  They were now more strange than ever, for the enthusiast, finding that some few amateurs were beginning to recognize serious merits in his works, found it necessary to hurry on a bit, so as to keep out of the crush of popular appreciation.

  As he said, triumphantly, “Now they b
uy my early work, and I remember when it was just as much abused as what I do to-day. It is the old story; you paint violet this year, and they cry it down, and in three years after you find everybody painting still more violet.”

  Lewis met Stanley, and was very much struck by his picture of a racecourse. It showed the crowd outside the saddling paddock, with some racers walking down the course, the principal horse’s head being cut in two by a long white post. It was, as Frazer said, a vigorous protest against the conventional forms of composition.

  Lewis listened to their denunciations of the academical rules into which art had fallen, vaguely conscious of the truth, but quite unable to grasp the general application of the theory. He looked at the work done, and saw that, notwithstanding all its wildness, it was more interesting than the endless repetitions of the same formula which crowd yearly the walls of the academy.

  He grew to love art more and more; the hollow, empty look of his own work, when compared with the high æsthetic fervour of what he had seen at Thompson’s, drove him to distraction, and he racked his brain trying to think of what he should do. He neglected his drawing, as did Crossley, and sought for the sentiment of the effect; and then again he tried to draw as Thompson did, by the character, and to get rid of the mechanical method he had learned at the “Beaux-Arts.”

  But it was no use, he battled with his intelligence as much as he could; he squeezed it, he wrenched it, but without producing one drop of the wonderful elixir — originality.

  This struggle lasted nearly four months; daily his desire sought to take his mind by storm; but the walls of the mind are unscalable, and again and again he fell back exhausted. Still he felt he was not born to fail. He was right.

  He had, by a moral something equal in physics to a hair’s breadth, escaped Frazer’s lot in life. Had he, without an immense increase of artistic power, been able to see an idea more distinctly, poverty and misery would have been his inheritance, instead of pleasure and luxury. Nay, more, had he been less cowardly, less selfish, he would have striven to bear the burden above his strength, instead of taking up the lighter one that was destined for him.

  Not his good, but his bad, qualities saved him, and led him out of the labyrinth in which he had lost himself Sustained by the example of his friends, his weak nature had borne up bravely, but it had been strained to the uttermost, and it gave way utterly when one morning the servant brought him a letter from a dealer, saying that he could not buy a certain picture Mr. Seymour had sent him. He read the dealer’s letter again, and asked himself, despairingly, what he was to do? Where was all he had learned in France? Did it count for nothing? Was it possible he could not do as well as the wretched stuff he saw in the shop-windows? Exhausted and wearied, he felt he could persevere no longer, and yearned piteously for a word of comfort, for the pressure of a hand; then he thought of Mrs. Bentham.

  During the last four months he had seen very little of her; she had not come up to London very often, and he had been down only twice to Claremont House, and so tormented was he with his art-fever, that he only stayed a few days.

  Indeed, he had latterly done nothing but work; it had so entirely absorbed his thoughts that he had not written to her for three weeks. He had had scarcely time to think of her, and he now started when the servant suddenly opened the door and announced her.

  She was agitated; she seemed surprised at finding him alone. Lewis’s silence — for they wrote to each other constantly — had at first caused her much wearying uneasiness; but as the letterless days passed by, she began to doubt, and was soon feverish with fear.

  In Paris the Marquise de Maure’s flirtations had caused her some pain; but it was not till now that she knew all the terror of losing. She felt slowly, but strongly, and for the last fortnight she had seen nothing but his hands laid on other hands than hers, heard nothing but his voice speaking to phantom women, who passed in endless procession before her. For a time her pride had kept her from coming to see him, and asking for an explanation, but at last her anguish grew so poignant that she could resist no longer, and came up to London.

  Her coming was a great relief, and plaintively he told her how he had tried and failed; how art had bitterly repulsed him, and at last, in a burst of hysterical passion, he threw himself into her arms and wept In all lives, even the humblest, there is always an hour which, like a picture or poem, stands out from the’ rest, because it is the hour which resumes the most completely the conflicting desires and emotions of which our lives are made. And this hour was Mrs. Bentham’s. This hour when the twilight was darkening, and the figures on the easels began to look like white spots, when her lover surrendered his dreams, and came to her as a child for comfort and consolation.

  “When the first paroxysm of his grief was over, Lewis told her the story of the mental struggle he had gone through, and he explained how he had not only failed in attaining his ideal, but had not even succeeded in pleasing the picture dealers. He showed her the letter he had just received, and declared that the first post to-morrow morning would bring him another from Mr. Carver, refusing to take the pictures he had sent him in payment of the fifty pounds he owed him. Mrs. Bentham knew nothing about this, for Lewis had always concealed from her the details of his poverty. But now, forgetful of everything, he told her how she had saved him from suicide, how Mr. Carver had lent him fifty pounds to buy clothes to go down to Claremont House. The bill had been renewed three times; it was now a hundred and twenty, and Mr. Carver was threatening him with his solicitor.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  MOTHER AND MISTRESS.

  ON LEAVING LEWIS that evening, Mrs. Bentham went to call on Mr. Carver. He had left his shop, but it being no time for delaying, she drove to his private house and asked to see him. The servant showed her up to the drawing-room, a pompous room full of pictures and china, all of which, curiously enough, looked as much for sale as if they were still in the Pall Mall window.

  When Mrs. Bentham called, Mr. Carver was dining in the bosom of his family; but he came upstairs with alacrity, smiling, and picking his teeth with his tongue. He was delighted to see Mrs. Bentham, he inundated her with a fluent flow of affable conversation, in which he referred to the weather, the triumph of the Tories in ‘74, French art, and the pleasure it gave him to hear that she was satisfied with the way Mr. Seymour had carried out her scheme of decoration.

  During the course of this conversation, Mrs. Bentham, with many periphrases and comments, explained that she wished to enter into some arrangement concerning the two pictures with which Mr. Seymour proposed to repay the money he, Mr. Carver, had been good enough to advance him.

  The subject was a delicate one; but Mr. Carver, seeing an opportunity of displaying his tact, helped Mrs. Bentham out of her difficulties in so skilful a manner that it seemed more a pleasure than a pain to take him into your confidence. He saw things from a wide and noble point of view, understood all the delicacies of sentiment, and was delightfully unsuspicious of the existence of baser motives. Then he referred to Lewis’s talent; he explained the terrible struggle of all débutants; he lamented the indifference of the modern world to art, nay, the positive hatred that existed to all that appertained to art; he deplored the fact that the public would subscribe thousands of pounds for founding asylums for mad dogs, but would not give a guinea to rescue the modern Raphaels that were dying of want. According to Mr. Carver, there were hundreds of Michael Angelos and Shakespeares starving, unknown, in London garrets, waiting for the kind hand of some protector to be extended towards them.

  Mr. Carver rose to the situation; and when he hinted that in giving Mr. Seymour the decorations to do, she had saved an eternal talent from an ignoble death, tears rose to her eyes, and her heart expanded with a great and ineffable tenderness.

  There was a ring of truth in his words when he asked to what nobler work could a woman devote herself than thus succouring talent? He spoke so warmly and eloquently, that at last he found himself forced to apologise for the emotion he
had shown. Then, throwing himself into the Napoleonic pose, he surveyed his battle-field.

  Mrs. Bentham looked at him in admiration; he had stirred her to the depths of her being, and she longed, like an antique heroine, to act nobly, to succour the arts, and to save genius from extinction. She felt that these were noble things for her to do, and the only question was how to do them.

  A pause had intervened, and the dealer’s thoughts had gone back to his entrée, which was now cold; but at the sound of Mrs. Bentham’s voice he resumed the pose and looked profoundly into space. Mr. Seymour’s talent was thoroughly discussed. Again Mr. Carver predicted brilliant success for Lewis; he would meet with opposition at first, but such was the fate of genius.

  But the inability of the public to judge between the true and the false took so long to explain that Mr. Carver gave up his dinner and made up his mind to have a hot supper at his club on the strength of these extra business hours.

  However, at last, by a series of hints, he contrived to lead Mrs. Bentham up to the idea that it would be an excellent thing for her to purchase yearly eight or nine hundred pounds worth of Mr. Seymour’s pictures. This would, as Mr. Carver argued, encourage him to persevere with classic art, and not prostitute himself to the public taste. Once arrived at this, a word solved the problem, and Mrs. Bentham entrusted the mission to Mr. Carver, who guaranteed that Mr. Seymour should remain ever ignorant of his unknown benefactress.

  In listening to the details of Mr. Carver’s projects, Mrs. Bentham saw the work of her life floating out of the mists of dreamland and taking a palpable form. Joyously she congratulated herself that after all her life would not be a useless one, that she had a mission to perform: and she resolved to perform it completely. Then her cheeks flushed with a feeling of false maternity; she thought of the duties she would have to fulfil, of the sacrifices she would have to make.

  And in her great joy she took Mr. Carver entirely into her confidence; she did not hesitate to ask him if she could do anything else to advance Lewis’s interests besides buying his pictures.