by George Moore
He retreated to watch the effect of his work, and in the frenzy of creation, soliloquised, explaining to himself, and to me, the reason why his pictures were refused by the Academy. The art that the Academicians catered for was a meanly realistic art, and for them to accept his picture of Cain defending his wife from wild beasts, the lion’s mane would have to be painted from the bearskin rug, every hair put in; and the dove that Jim’s memory of Alice Harford had rescued from Cupid and which she clasped to her bosom, would have to be studied from a dead pigeon sent round from the poulterer’s.
Alice’s great blonde body was finely conceived, and the movement of her shoulders bending over the eager boy was well enough, somewhat rudimentary, but better in a way than the frigid sophistications that pass for art in Burlington House. If he had nothing else he had the sense of the noble and the beautiful, but was he speaking the whole truth when he said that the Academicians would hang the picture if every feather were imitated from real feathers? Did he believe it to be as well painted as the Correggio in the National Gallery? Was the modelling of that shoulder altogether faultless? Was it not emptier than the Correggio? Was not the Correggio more real? At that moment it became clear to me that the feet were not as beautiful as those in the bright picture of the Italian master, and that Jim could not make them as beautiful, for he had not learned to draw and to paint from Nature. If he had gone to the Academy schools and subjected his genius to discipline, he might have been the great painter of modern times; but I could not see Jim attending the Academy schools, drawing patiently from the model, working out the shadows with a stump. My thoughts must have stopped there if they ever got quite so far; and now the explanation of the enigma seems to me that Jim was one born before due time and out of due place, in Mayo in 1830. For his talent to have ripened fully he should have been born in Venice in 1660. His mentality was of that period, and his appearance coincided with his talent — splendid shoulders, fine head upreared, an over-modelled brow, a short aquiline nose, proud nostrils, long languid hands. But why enumerate? A portrait by Van Dyck.
Get out of my way, he cried, and squeezing out the best part of a tube of raw umber on his palette and breaking it with a little black, he whisked in the lion’s tail, and with another brush sought out the yellow ochre and the Naples yellow, and Cain’s wife received such a dower of tresses that I was thrilled. It was my sense of the voluptuous and romantic that drew me to Jim and his pictures, and I remember him crossing the room one day and seeking among the canvases and returning with a small one, six feet by four, in which a brown satyr overtook a nymph at the corner of a wood. My eyes dilated and I licked my lips.
The best thing you have ever painted in your life, Jim. Why do you turn it away to the wall?
He murmured something about his sisters who sometimes came into the room unexpectedly, and throwing himself on the sofa melted into another of those long soliloquies very dear to me at that time — a flow of talk of Michael Angelo, Rubens, and Raphael; and mixed with his remembrances of the pictures he had seen in Italy were remembrances of pictures and statues that he had modelled and painted himself, the colossal statue of Caractacus that he had exhibited in London when he was seventeen, and the great picture of the Battle of Arbela, forty feet wide by twenty feet high, containing several life-size elephants. At that time he had painted and modelled in the same studio, leaving the picture for the statue and the statue for the picture, and, my admiration roused, I begged him to tell me where were these pictures and this statue; but without answering my question he broke into a criticism of Ary Scheffer’s picture of the Devil offering Christ the Kingdom of Earth if he would cast himself down and worship him. Christ raises his hand and the gesture portrays the famous words, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, while the Devil points downward.
The two men are speaking at the same time.
And in your picture, Jim?
Christ listens while the Devil offers him the earth, he answered, and he did not speak again for a long time so that I might better appreciate his genius. An intense moment of appreciation was when he said that no gallery in the world afforded so many beautiful pictures to his sight as did a dirty ceiling. He had only to half close his eyes to see Last Judgments finer than Michael Angelo’s, and if he closed his eyes a little he could rediscover his Battle of Arbela.
The lost picture, I said. But, Jim, the satyr overturning the nymph; is he visible in the ceiling above your head?
Jim laughed.
Perhaps not in his ceiling, but in the ceiling above the little sofa at Alice Harford’s.
These lapses of humour jarred a little, and I was glad when he lowered his eyes from the ceiling and remained quite still considering the picture of the nymph and the satyr, and I thrilled again when he said, That picture has all the beauties of Raphael and other beauties besides. In youth one likes exaggeration, and in response to my cry for Art Jim said: If you want to learn painting you must go to France.
His words were like All ashore; the vessel moves away, but so slowly that one does not feel it is moving, and three weeks after my arrival in Paris I wrote to Jim from the Hôtel Voltaire, Quai Voltaire, asking him if he would come over and stay with me; I had a room which I did not use and he was welcome to it. But he wrote saying that he could not come over to Paris at present; and I was very much hurt by his ironical thanks for the room which I could not use. But it is the room that one does not use one offers a friend, not one’s own bedroom, I said, and continued to consider his rude letter, wondering what had provoked it, without being able to discover any reason. Some months later he wrote again, this time in French, and to prove to mes camarades d’atelier that it was possible for an Englishman to write French I took the letter out of my pocket, and while they scanned it, picking out the English locutions, it struck me that if Jim was mistaken about his French he might well be mistaken about his pictures. And to convince myself of their worth I described the compositions to Julian — Julius Caesar Overturning the Altar of the Druids, The Bridal of Triermain, Cain Shielding his Wife from Wild Beasts — and Julian listened indulgently over many cups of coffee. He was becoming my intimate friend, allowing me to take him out to dinner and to treat him to the theatre; I was a little personage in his circle when a tall young man came into the studio late one afternoon — Lewis Welden Hawkins it was — and as we went with him to the café to drink a bowl of punch (the custom of the studio was that every new-comer should stand a bowl of punch), he turned and spoke to me in English, asking me, after a few remarks, if we had not met in Jim Browne’s studio.
The name of Jim Browne carried me back to Prince’s Gardens and to the moment when Jim introduced me to a tall young man whom I did not altogether like, so contemptuous was he of Jim’s genius, and of me when I invited him to come forward and tell me what he thought of Cain Shielding his Wife from Wild Beasts. He was Jim’s cousin, and therefore in a roundabout way my cousin; he had come over to London with a young Frenchwoman whom he called Louise, and I remembered Jim saying: I hope you have turned out something, meaning that he hoped that Lewis had painted a picture, for he had left the Navy to study painting; but the young man had answered, I don’t know if I have turned out anything, but I have turned up a good deal, an answer which displeased me. There was no time to remember any more. We had arrived at the café; the conversation had become general, and the first thing that was borne in upon me was that Lewis spoke French like a Frenchman; his thoughts moved in the language, which was not extraordinary, since he was born in Brussels, and when we returned to the studio the whole studio gathered about his easel and admired his audacity, for he had sketched in the model and the entire background — the stove that kept the model warm, the screen behind which he dressed and undressed, and the yellow curtain which sheltered him from draughts. The elders, Renouf and Boutet de Monvel, saw through Lewis’s facility; to them it was merely du chic, Ignorance giving itself airs, but to me who could not express myself at all, and who spent a whole week stuttering and
stammering through a wretched drawing, the hour’s work on Lewis’s canvas was almost as wonderful as one of Jim’s pictures.
His manners were winning and easy; he crossed the studio with a deference proper in a new-comer, and seating himself in front of my drawing he advised me. And at five o’clock, when the studio closed, we went away together in a carriage, for he wanted to show me his studio, which was far away behind the Gare du Nord, too far to walk; moreover he was in a hurry. But he seemed to forget his hurry when we reached the Place Maubeuge, remembering suddenly that he had to see Louise, who lived in the Rue Maubeuge. And it being always pleasant to see a woman, I was disappointed when the concierge said that Madame was not at home. But another friend of his lived up the street. She was not at home either, so he scribbled a note in the concierge’s lodge, and bethought himself of another. She too was out; mais si monsieur veut monter ... la bonne est en haute. No, he was in a hurry. He scribbled another note; we dashed into the cab again. But he must speak with — We jumped out, and in the middle of a low-ceilinged room he engaged in conversation with a lady who came from her bedroom somewhat flurried in a peignoir. She spoke to me in English, but as soon as she turned to Lewis she dropped into French, which she seemed to speak very well, for I noticed that instead of saying Vous avez tort, as I should have said, she said Je vous donne tort, a phrase which I did not know and kept chewing all the way to his studio, while he confided to me that he was now living with an English girl who had come over with a theatrical company to Brussels. He was expecting her to call for him, so there was female society to look forward to, and the carriage drew up at the door of the house in which he was living.
You won’t have to go up many stairs. I am on the entresol, he said. His studio was a large room with a great fireplace, in which he had hung an iron pot on a chain. The fireplace had cost seven hundred and fifty francs; seven hundred and fifty francs represented no actual sum of money to me; it was a pitiful thing to have to turn francs into pounds and to have to ask if any cooking was done in the pot, for of course I should have known that the pot and chain were decorative effect, as were the Turkish lamps and draperies, as indeed everything in the room was, including Lewis himself, especially when he took a fiddle from the wall and began playing.
Stradella’s Chant d’Église — do you know it?
Alas! I didn’t, and after hearing it my wonderment increased, for Lewis said that he did not know a note of music, but had met a vagrant once and had picked up some knowledge of the fiddle in half an hour. He soon wearied of the fiddle, and going to a small organ he strummed snatches of Verdi’s Requiem, till a young girl entered the room out of breath.
Lewis!
She stopped suddenly on seeing me, and turning his head he introduced me to a beautiful girl, and one in the bloom of her first beauty, a tall girl of seventeen or eighteen, with brown eyes and fair hair. She had come to fetch Lewis to dinner, and it occurred to me that she might be disappointed at finding me with Lewis. But he assured me they would be glad of my company if I didn’t mind dining at Alphonsine’s. Not the least. But who was Alphonsine? An old light-o’-love, he said, who gathered all her friends around her table d’hôte, at three francs and a half. His supercilious style delighted me, and he left me talking to Alice while he crossed the street to order some coals at the charbonnerie, and he looked such a fine fellow, as he stepped from one paving-stone to the other, that Alice could not restrain her admiration.
What a toff he is!
A toff he was, not a tailor’s toff, but one of Nature’s toffs, a tall, thin young man and yet powerful, his long arms could no doubt deal a swinging blow on occasions, and in a race his long legs would have carried him past many a competitor. His shoulders were ample, and his small face was not spoilt by a broken nose. He must have told me how his nose was broken; I have forgotten; but in my memory of him it contrasts happily with the soft violet eyes, giving character to the face — a face which absorbed and interested me all the evening, my eyes returning to him again and again as he leaned across the table telling stories in fluent French, delighting everybody, the men as well as the women, assembled under the awning.
What is he saying? Alice asked me. I could not tell her, alas! He thinks he is such a fine man that all he would have to do would be to strip himself naked and walk into a woman’s room for her to fall down and adore him.
I begged her to tell me about Marie Pellegrin.
You admire her, don’t you? Well, she’ll cost you a thousand francs; but if you were a voyou —
What’s a voyou?
A cad — you could have her for nothing.
And if she is rich why does she come here? Are all the women here worth a thousand francs?
Alice laughed scornfully and broke off the conversation, and applied herself to trying to understand what Lewis was saying.
I wonder why she came here. She must have left the Grand Duke.
What Grand Duke?
All dukes are the same. Do hold your tongue.
Lewis told me afterwards that Marie had been to Russia and had had hundreds of thousands of francs from the Grand Duke, but she liked les voyous du quartier better, and returned to them when she was bored. She had just come back from Russia and was spending her earnings in the Rue Breda, and, intoxicated with the romance of the story, I begged of Lewis to tell me more about her. But he had told me all he knew, and Alice sat very much annoyed, for she was just as pretty a girl as Marie Pellegrin, and if she had had the luck to be introduced to Grand Dukes she would know how to put her money to better use.
We were in a victoria, for Lewis had proposed an excursion to Bullier, and a train of cabs crossed Paris, over the bridge down the Rue du Bac and round the Luxembourg. But I cannot write with the same insight and sympathy of the Bal Bullier as I did of the Élysée Montmartre, in the story entitled The End of Marie Pellegrin. I am a Montmartre kin, and Bullier, unhallowed by memories, rises up a mere externality, a crowd pushing through the tables and chairs set under trees, sweating waiters doing their best, and the band under cover, a sort of exaggerated shed into which one walked from the garden. I never danced at Bullier, and it matters little to me that the finest can-can dancers assembled there; polkas and waltzes were looked upon as a kind of waste of time, but the moment the band struck up a quadrille, a crowd formed in dense rings, and the merits of the kickers were discussed as eagerly as the toreadors in Madrid and Seville. The grisettes of the quarter advanced kicking furiously, and about one in the morning the company separated through the Latin Quarter, the Montmartrians returning by themselves, for nothing was more rare than for a Montmartrian to bring a grisette back with him, the girls being with one accord faithful to their quarter.
Lewis and Alice dropped me at the Hôtel de Russie, going on themselves to the Rue St Denis, somewhere between the Boulevard Sebastopol and the Gare du Nord, I think. My last words to him were, You’ll be sure to be at the studio tomorrow, for I was anxious that Julian should see my cousin’s picture, and I can see myself still bringing him round to Lewis’s easel. An instinctive fellow Julian was, divining at once a useful ally in Lewis, and, to make sure of him, Julian proposed a few weeks later that we — Lewis, myself, Julian, Renouf, Boutet de Monvel, and a few others — should take the first boat next Sunday morning to Bas Meudon. The landscape painters, he said, would find some pretty motives along the banks of the Seine; the others could go for a walk, and I remember that Renouf and Boutet de Monvel went off together, and returned an hour later saying that they had found nothing that tempted them. Whereas Lewis had been immediately struck by the picturesque ascension of the staircase leading up from the river to the village. Was it jealousy that stayed them from admiring his facility? I asked myself, for they did not seem to admire the picture that Lewis had nearly completed on a panel; bestowing only a casual glance at it, they began to talk about breakfast; but Lewis could not be persuaded to lay aside his palette overflowing with bitumen and cadmium yellow; he continued to add bits of dra
wing, and I to admire the perspective and to wonder how he did it; Alice watched him from under her sunshade, and Julian caught my serious attention when he said: All that facility will go for nothing if he doesn’t come to work at the studio. We found the others waiting for us at the door of the restaurant, very impatient, and to my delight our table was laid under a trellis, and the green leaves and the white table appealed to my imagination and the cutlets and the omelettes linger in my memory, and the races that we ran in the evening when the bats came out, Lewis beating me a little in one race, for his legs were longer, but only just beating me, whereupon one whose name I cannot recall challenged me to race him for a bottle of champagne, and Lewis whispered, Take him on; you’ll run away from him. And to my surprise Lewis’s judgment turned out right; my competitor gave up after a few yards, we drank his champagne, and the boat took us back to Paris, all a little conscious that the last lights of a happy day were dying — a day that I felt I should never forget. We shall be thinking of this day when we are old men, I said to Lewis, and was ashamed for a moment of my emotion. He had not heard, he was talking to Alice. The night gathered about the green banks of the Seine, and the dim poplars struck through the last bar of light which seemed as if it could not die; the month being June, it lingered between grey clouds till the boat had passed under the first bridge....
And then, bridge after bridge, the landing, the separations, each one returning to his bed, his mind filled with remembrances of blue air, and flowing water, and swaying trees. Did Alice return with Lewis? I think so. She was certainly with us a few weeks later, for Lewis had caught sight of a picturesque corner, and was full of scorn of Renouf and Boutet de Monvel who had missed it, and we three returned to Bas Meudon for Lewis to paint it. But the Seine was so sunny the morning we arrived that a swim suggested itself to Lewis, and a boat was hired, and a boatman rowed us to the near side of an island. Alice, who could not swim at all, remained in the shallows with me, who could swim only a little, and splashing about together we watched Lewis disporting himself in mid-stream, breasting the current, head upreared, turning over on his side and rushing through the water like some great fish. We admired him until he passed behind the island; and then Alice would have me teach her to swim. We were getting on nicely when, in sport, I threatened to duck her. She screamed to me to let her go, and as soon as I lost hold of her she went under, coming up unconscious, though she had not been under the water for more than a few seconds. The boatmen came to my assistance quickly, and Lewis came swimming by, and together we got her into the boat. Good God, Lewis, try to bring her to, I cried, falling on my knees beside her, terribly frightened, for Lewis was so angry with me that I could not doubt that he would pitch me into the river if he failed to revive her. At last she opened her eyes, and after a tender scene between her and Lewis, we rowed back to the inn, where her beauty inspired much commiseration.
