by George Moore
The picture dealer was now busy trying to sell to her a Venetian mirror which hung on the wall opposite, and the lady examined it so attentively that Lewis thought she was going to buy it, but, as he looked from her to the mirror itself, he saw with surprise that she was examining him. Their eyes met for a moment, and then she turned to ask Mr. Carver some questions anent a small picture which stood on a tall Chinese vase in the far corner. And to exhibit the little picture in a better light Mr. Carver carried it over to where Lewis was sitting, asking Lewis politely to move a little on one side, and then, holding the picture under the light, he began:
“Yes, Mrs. Bentham, this is a very sweet landscape by Corot; I can guarantee it. I had it of a man who bought it from the artist himself — you know his signature?”
She made some casual remarks, and then her eyes wandered from the picture to Lewis.
The women who like rugged men would have said that his hands were too long and white, his eyes of too soft a blue, and that the languid poses his limbs fell into naturally were too girl-like. But beauty in rags touches the heart and imagination, and already Mrs. Bentham felt singularly curious to know who he was.
The occasion was ready at hand. She had seen him unpacking his picture; it was there before her.
“Oh, what a charming picture!” she said; “and how prettily the Cupids are grouped round the Venus! An expensive picture, Mr. Carver; are you going to buy it?”
“It is a commission I had from a gentleman; he ordered it to fit a corner of a smoking-room,” replied Mr. Carver.
Mr. Carver was a large, stout man, and, like most men of his calling, he was observant, and having caught Mrs. Bentham more than once looking at the young painter, suspected already that she was interested in him.
But afraid to introduce him because of his shabby appearance, he resolved, seeing that Mrs. Bentham still continued to look at Lewis, to adopt a middle course.
“You see, Mr. Seymour,” he said in his pompous way, “listeners do sometimes hear good of themselves.”
Lewis blushed, and Mrs. Bentham pretended to look a little confused.
“I’m sure I think the picture charming,” she said, half to Lewis, half to the dealer.
Lewis’s heart was in his mouth, and he nervously tried to button his collar.
“I should like to buy this picture,” said Mrs. Bentham, as she advanced to examine the Cupids more minutely; “but don’t you think there’s too much sea and sky for the size of the panel?”
Lewis blushed red, and felt so ashamed of his clothes that he could scarcely say a word.
Mrs. Bentham was disappointed at his obstinacy, and, after another attempt to get him into conversation, she turned away, thinking him a very uninteresting young man. But at this moment Lewis caught Mr. Carver’s eyes upon him, and as a gleam of sunlight awakens a bird, he recovered himself. And the spell being broken, he chattered pleasantly.
“Ha, ha!” thought the picture dealer, as he played with his watch-chain. “So, Mrs. Bentham, you like my painters better than my pictures. Well, never mind; I dare say I shall be able to turn your tastes to my advantage, no matter how they lie.”
For a moment his face wore the expression of a man who has done a good action, but as he talked to his shopman it grew more reflective. An idea had struck him. He remembered that some time ago — some six months ago, but that didn’t matter — Mrs. Bentham had asked him if he knew an artist who would, under her direction, decorate her ballroom from a series of drawings she had collected for the purpose; she had never put her delightful scheme for the decoration of her ballroom into execution, and Mr. Carver felt that the golden time had come for her to do so.
A few prefatory remarks on decorative art were necessary before he reminded her of her ballroom, and suggested Mr. Seymour as the very person to whom such a work might be confidently entrusted. Æsthetics were Mr. Carver’s foible, and Lewis had aroused Mrs. Bentham’s sympathy; the idea that she might help him was already stirring in her heart, but she was not prepared for so swift a transition from her dream of possibilities to an actual opportunity. The vague desire, in which she had found pleasure a moment earlier, frightened her when it took shape in Mr. Carver’s suggestion, and she received it with silent astonishment, mingled with desire and fear, for if she gave this commission to the young man she must ask him as a visitor to Claremont House, and the dealer began to think that his desire had outstripped hers. And this was so, but their desires were, all the same, travelling along the same road. And being a man of ready wit, he was pleased to let the question rest for the present and to talk about Corot. But the idea of the decorations seemed to sing in Mrs. Bentham’s ears, and afraid that her silence had wounded Lewis, she returned to the subject of the ballroom. She glanced at him, she hesitated, and eventually, not knowing well what to do, she promised to call again in the course of the afternoon, and wishing them both good-morning, got into her carriage and vanished like a good fairy.
Lewis stood looking after her in amazement, until Mr. Carver tapped him on the shoulder.
“Well, my young friend,” he said, affecting an American accent, “I guess you are in good luck; you’ve only to play your cards well”; then, pulling his long whiskers, he leaned over and whispered: “She has seven thousand a year, and has been separated from her husband for the last ten years.”
Lewis did not answer, not knowing quite what the dealer meant.
And after watching him for a few moments, his head thrown back in the fashion of a picture he had once possessed of Napoleon surveying the field of Austerlitz, he said:
“I’m afraid you’re too green; but if you weren’t —— —— —”
He did not finish his phrase; he seemed to see a conquered world at his feet. At last, awaking from his reverie, the dealer said, surveying Lewis attentively:
“You owe me a big debt of gratitude.”
“Which I will repay you one of these days if I get on as well as you seem to think I shall. But do you think she’ll give me the work to do that you and she were speaking about?”
“Oh, that I can’t say!” said Mr. Carver, murmuring like one waiting for an inspiration; “but I think it quite possible that she may interest herself in you — that is to say, if I speak of you as perhaps I may be tempted to do.”
Lewis ventured to hope that Mr. Carver would be so tempted.
At last he went over to the till, and taking out three sovereigns, gave them to Lewis.
“This is what I owe you. Call here to-morrow morning; I shall see her this afternoon, and will speak to her on the subject.”
Lewis thanked him for his kind intentions, and asked him if he were satisfied with the panel.
“Oh, perfectly, perfectly! It is very satisfactory indeed.”
“Then you will give me another to do?”
“Yes, I shall have two ready for you to-morrow — that is to say, if nothing comes of the matter in hand,” he added.
And stunned with the shake the sudden turn of Fortune’s wheel had given him, Lewis walked towards the Strand, wondering how it was that Mr. Carver knew so well what Mrs. Bentham would do.
As he turned into Pall Mall he met Frazer, one of a group of painters who styled themselves “The Moderns.” And Lewis continued to relate his adventure till he noticed that Frazer was absorbed in contemplating the lights and shadows in the streets; then he stopped.
The day was sloppy, but the sun shone between the showers, and the violet roofs of Waterloo Place glittered, scattering around reflections of vivid colour. A strip of sky, of a lighter blue than the slates, passed behind the dome of the National Gallery, the top of which came out black against a black cloud that held the approaching downpour.
“You say that my sunset effects are too violet in tone. Look yonder!” exclaimed the enthusiast; “isn’t everything violet — walls, pools, and carriages? I can see nothing that isn’t violet.”
Lewis admitted that there were some violet tones in the effect, but denied that it
was composed exclusively of that colour.
As they walked the violet question was argued passionately, but whereas Frazer’s whole soul was in the discussion, Lewis was thinking if he should invite his friend to come with him to a bar-room and have something to eat.
And Frazer, who had had only a dried herring at a fish-stand for dinner the night before, assented, hoping that he might be able to bring Lewis back to the fold, for Lewis had been a “Modern” once, about a year ago.
“Where shall we dine? The Gaiety bar?”
The place was full of people lolling in groups and couples along a counter, with girls all arow behind the counter, their clear voices, as they gave an order, ringing above the long murmur of the conversation.
At last Lewis cried “Here!” and flopped down into one of the crescent-shaped nooks beneath the cathedral windows.
He ordered a copious lunch and much whisky and water, the sight of which attracted some academy students who were talking to the barmaids, and with whisky to drink and Frazer to chaff, the academy students did not feel the time passing; and when they had got the enthusiast to say that the only painting of any interest was what “The Moderns” were doing, they could contain themselves no longer and giggled into their glasses. Frazer never lost his temper, and, regardless of the mirth he occasioned, continued to pour forth his aphorisms. At last the hilarity was cut short by the appearance of Thompson coming down the great saloon bar with Harding, the novelist, whose books were denounced by the Press as being both immoral and cynical. Places were made for the two leaders of the modern movement, and Lewis began at once to tell them about his adventure.
“So you are going to decorate walls,” said Thompson drily, “with extracts from Boucher, and you are going to do it together — she with her palette and you with your brush? Well, I hope the collaboration will succeed.”
“I suppose you would like me to paint ballet-girls and housemaids over Greek walls. If the room is Greek, the decorations must be Greek — at least, it seems so to me.”
“Naturally,” replied Thompson languidly (he had not much belief in Lewis’s artistic future). “But don’t you think there is a way of giving a modernised version of Greek subjects that would be quite as archæologically correct as the Greek seen through Boucher? Do what he did: take an old form and colour it with the spirit of the age you live in.”
The remark awakened a hundred thoughts in Lewis’s mind, and he remained thinking.
“But,” said Harding, “he will succeed much better by joining the woman than by working with us. The age is dying of false morality and sentimentality, and neither you nor I can do anything to help it, nor a host like us. These women with their poetry, their art, their aspirations, have devoured everything like a plague of locusts; they have conquered the nineteenth century as the Vandals did Europe in the sixth. Later on, I dare say they will arrive at something; at present they are a new race, and have not yet had time to digest what they have learned, much less to create anything new.”
“Not created anything new!” exclaimed an academy student; “what do you say to George Sand, George Eliot, and Rosa Bonheur?”
“That you have chosen the three I would have chosen myself to exemplify what I say. If they have created anything new, how is it that their art is exactly like our own? Who could tell that George Eliot’s novels are a woman’s writing, or that ‘The Horse Fair’ was not painted by a man? Women have not as yet been able to transfuse into art a trace of their sex; in other words, they haven’t been able to assume a point of view of their own. For instance, no one will deny that woman’s love must be different from a man’s; and if that be so, George Sand failed, for in no single instance did she paint woman’s love as different from what we conceive it to be. And what splendid chances she missed. Female emotion is an unknown quantity in art, but to analyse it an original talent would be required, and that is what they have not, and I’m afraid never will have. They arrange, explain, and expand, but they do not create; they do not even develop a formula — they merely vulgarise it, fit it for common use. They are not fathers in art or even mothers.”
“Quite so,” exclaimed Frazer; “and if all modern art is sentimental, it is owing to women, whose one interest in life is sentimentality. Sentimentality entered art in the nineteenth century. Even Shelley could not escape from it; his poetry is no more than loverisings thinly disguised.”
“But don’t you think love beautiful?” asked Lewis. “How could anyone write poetry without it? It is the soul of poetry. Even Swinburne, whom you so much admire, writes constantly about love.”
“Never!” said Frazer. “It would puzzle you to discover a trace of sentiment in his poetry unless, perhaps, in the poem entitled, ‘The Leper’; but then it was a leper who was sentimental.”
The conversation turned on women, and everyone, including the academy students, who spoke to each other, explained to his neighbour what his individual opinions were upon the subject. Lewis believed in passion, eternal devotion, and, above all, fidelity. He could not understand the sin of unfaithfulness; without truth there could not be love, and how a man could make love to his friend’s wife passed his comprehension. Frazer declared that in that respect only he had never feared his friends, and Thompson vowed that an artist cannot do better than to marry his cook: he makes sure of his servant’s honesty, and, who knows, finds a good model in her when the dishes have been washed up after dinner. “Now, Eliza! as soon as you’ve put the coffee on the table get your clothes off; I shall be in the studio in five minutes.”
Lewis, indignant, cited a number of successful painters and authors who had devoted their lives to love as well as to art, his remarks drawing forth a long discussion regarding the rival merits of Michael Angelo and Raphael, Wordsworth and Shelley. At last the conversation returned to its starting-point, and the possibility of creating a new æstheticism was again under discussion.
“I’m weary of argument,” said Thompson; “people won’t understand or can’t understand, and yet the whole question is as simple as A B C.”
“Well, what is your A B C?” asked an academy student.
“This,” replied Thompson: “ancient art was not, and modern art is, based upon logic. Our age is a logical one, and our art will not be able to hold aloof any longer from the general movement. Already the revolution is visible everywhere. It accomplishes nothing in music that it does not do in literature; nothing in literature that it does not do in painting. The novelist is gaining the day for the study of the surroundings; the painter for atmospheric effects; and the musician will carry the day for melodious uninterrupted deductions, for free harmony, which is the atmosphere of music.”
This profession of faith touched the heart of a musician who had joined them, and he exclaimed: “Just so; and yet it is impossible to explain to people that that is Wagner’s whole principle.”
There being no other musician present, the conversation went back to the novel, and somebody asked Harding why he always chose such unpleasant subjects.
“We do not always choose what you call unpleasant subjects, but we try to go to the roots of things; and the basis of life being material and not spiritual, the analyst inevitably finds himself, sooner or later, handling what this sentimental age calls coarse. But, like Thompson, I’m weary of the discussion. If your stomach will not stand the crudities of the moral dissecting-room, read verse; but don’t try to distort an art into something it is not, and cannot be. The novel, if it be anything, is contemporary history, an exact and complete reproduction of social surroundings; the novel is, in a word, environment. The poem, on the other hand, is an abstraction, and bears the same relation to the novel as the rich, ripe fruit which you relish when your hunger is satisfied does to the roast beef.”
“Believe before it is too late,” exclaimed Frazer, warmly, to the academy students; “the die has been cast; what has to come will come. It will not be Mr. Hilton’s Venus, nor Mr. Baring’s pretty mothers, that will Têtard the coming of
the modern art. A bombshell is about to break, and you open your umbrellas; but have a care, the bombshell will destroy without mercy all things, both the small and great, that oppose it. I say this as much for Mr. Hilton as for Mr. Baring, as much for Mr. Channel, as much for Mr. John Wright and Mr. Arthur Hollwood — I say it for all who aspire to live in the future.”
This speech, which was given with all the vigour of a prophecy, threw a chill on the conversation. Some tittered at the enthusiast’s vehemence; Thompson and Harding testified in a few words their approval of the opinions expressed. Lewis, who only half understood, and was possessed of a strong prejudice against all sudden events, felt uneasy at the prospect of bombshells against whose fury umbrellas would prove of no avail. At the end of an uneasy silence everybody began to speak quietly to his neighbour of the quality of the whisky and the disagreeableness of the weather, until the conversation turned on Bendish. He was criticised and defended, “good for a ‘quid’ or a ‘thin ‘un.’”
“He’ll always buy at a price, and we want more men like him,” was Frazer’s remark. But Lewis, who remembered his last visit to Fitzroy Square, was of a different opinion, and he wished that Frazer would cease to propound theories, commercial or aesthetic, and allow him to ask Thompson what his opinion really was about Mrs. Bentham and the decorations.
“An adulterous horizon opened up before me the moment you told us of his visit to Sussex,” Thompson said.
Lewis resented this criticism, and seeing that the chances of finding a sympathetic listener were becoming smaller and smaller, he began to think of going. It was just seven o’clock; Gwynnie would be due at half-past; he could just manage to get home in time to meet her. So, bidding his friends good-bye, he started off at a sharp pace, not staying his steps till he came to the Waterloo Road. Three days ago there was not one among the many that lived behind that long line of dismal windows with whom he would not have changed places; now he pitied them. Yesterday he had been one of them; to-day he knew her, and never again would he see the shop with the old iron and china piled about the walls. All this had gone by for ever and he walked so enrapt in his dream that he forgot to speak to Dinah, and asked his landlady abruptly if Miss Lloyd had come in, and on being told she had not, he opened his window, and resting his arms on the wall fell to thinking of the fine fortune that had befallen him. He was going away to decorate a ballroom in a country-house standing, no doubt, in the middle of some great park. He had often seen gate lodges, and wondered what the houses were like that stood at the end of the long drives; and now he was going to live in one of these houses among rich furniture, tall pictures, and a pack of men-servants — butlers, valets, and footmen; on every landing there would be housemaids, and outside there would be gardeners and grooms and coachmen; and when his day’s work was done he would walk out on the terraces to meet Mrs. Bentham, who...
