Chapter IV: The Picture-Makers

“Funny I’ve never been to see your place. I must look you up one day.” Thus Herbert at uncertain intervals, but he never carried out his threat. His life was too full, and he had been accustomed from childhood to have the mountain come to Mohammed. And so, gradually, Matt, who had at first lived half apprehensive of an exposure, half wishful that Herbert should become rudely aware of his real position, surrendered himself to the magnetism of his cousin’s manner, and weakly tried to live up to that young gentleman’s misconception of him whenever they were together; even submitting to a morning suit and an evening dress from Herbert’s tailor for an undefined sum at an unmentioned date. For if the disadvantages of Herbert’s society were many, if he had to starve for days to return Herbert’s club hospitality at a restaurant, still he was satisfied the game was worth the candle. From Herbert he felt himself acquiring polish and refinement and impeccable English and social lore; Herbert was an intellectual stimulus, with thoughts to give away and the newest poets to lend; Herbert was bright and gay, charming away the vapors of youthful despondency. But, above all, Herbert sometimes allowed him to work in his studio, amid the sensuous beauty of draping and decoration and statuary that lapped his artistic nature like a soft summer sea--a privilege inestimable, but, in view of the mere model, worth at least all the extra money this friendship cost him. It befell thus:

On Matt’s second visit Herbert said, good-naturedly:

“I’ve just laid my palette. You sit down. Let’s see what you can do.”

“May I?” cried Matt, eagerly. There was a costume-model on the throne--a dark-eyed beauty in Oriental drapery.

Herbert relinquished the brush and threw himself upon his back on the couch, puffing lazily at his cigarette.

“By Jove!” he said, after ten minutes, “you’ve put that in all right. But what a juicy style you’ve got! Where did you get that from?”

“I can’t do it any other way,” said Matt, apologetically.

“The governor told me you’re under Tarmigan. He never taught you that?”

“No; but that’s the way I’ve always worked. I did a lot of portraits in Nova Scotia.”

“The devil you did! No wonder you’ve made money, confound you! I thought you were a blooming ignoramus just come over to learn your pictorial pothooks and hangers.”

“I thought so, too,” said Matt, flushing with pleasure and modesty.

“None of your sarcasm, you beggar. You can finish the head if you like.”

“Thank you,” said Matt, flutteringly. He felt as if Herbert were heaping coals of fire upon his own head, repaying his first secret depreciation by over-generous praise. He painted away bravely, soon losing himself in the happy travail of execution.

“I must come down to your place and see your work,” said Herbert, looking up from the volume of Swinburne in which he had immersed himself.

“Oh, there isn’t much!” said Matt, hastily. “I’ll bring you some little things next time. Only I don’t want your father to see them--they’re not for sale.”

“You’re quite right,” said Herbert. “Don’t show ’em to him. Hush!”

“What’s the matter?” asked Matt, turning his head.

“Talk of the--Old Gentleman,” said Herbert.

The brush dropped from the painter’s palsied fingers. He felt like one caught red-handed. He had already come in, somewhat surreptitiously, through the side door, in obedience to Herbert’s recommendation, and to be found using Herbert’s appliances and model would be the acme of guiltiness.

The alarm was false, but thenceforward “The Old Gentleman” indicated Matthew Strang the elder. For they had frequent occasion to fear his advent, since Matt came often, tempted from his gloomy back room to the beautiful light studio, where he was allowed not only to do bits of Herbert’s work while Herbert read or gossiped with the model, but occasionally to set up another easel and use the same model. But they were only detected together twice by the Vandyke beard and the velvet coat, and on one occasion Herbert had had time to resume the brush, and on another to pose Matt as a model.

“The Old Gentleman’s rather grumpy about you,” he admitted, with his customary candor. “I’ve had to tell the servant not to mention your coming so often. The mater’s mashed on you, and I suppose he’s a bit jealous. She wanted to ask you to our dinner-party last night--we had two Associates, and a Scotch Academician, and an American millionaire who buys any rot, and an art critic who praises it--but he said one didn’t give dinner-parties for one’s relations, but for strangers.”

As Matt had already dined once _en famille_, with Madame’s guileless homage at his side to put him at ease, he did not feel himself hardly used.

His position with “The Old Gentleman” was not improved by his demeanor on an occasion when, meeting him in the doorway, Herbert’s father, instead of raising remonstrant eyebrows, astonished him by asking if he would like to see the masterpieces he had in stock. Matt did not know that this generous offer was due to the death of a member of the Institute whose watercolors had been accumulating on Matthew Strang’s hands, and who now, even before his funeral, was showing signs of a posthumous “boom;” he replied eagerly that nothing could be a greater favor. The picture-dealer waved his jewelled hand with pompous geniality, and, mounting one flight of stairs, with the hand on Matt’s shoulder, ushered him into the holy of holies, a chamber religious with purple curtains and hushed with soft carpets, where the more precious pictures reposed behind baize veils that for possible purchasers were lifted with a reverent silence bespeaking a hundred extra guineas. Long habit of ritual awe made Matthew Strang’s hands pious even before his nephew.

But his nephew’s expected ecstasies were tempered by unexpected criticism. In an eminent Academician’s portrait of a lady, Matt pointed out that the eyes were wrong, that pupils should be round, not squashy, and that the hot shadows made by the Indian reds under the nose were inspired by Romney. He questioned the veracity of a landscape by a costly name, demurring to the light on the under sides of the leaves as impossible under the conditions depicted; and in a historical composition by an old English master he found a lack of subtlety in the legs, and a stringy feeling throughout.

All this wanton depreciation of goods by one who was not even an interested bargainer galled the picture-dealer, conscious of overflowing good-nature, and prepared for a natural return in breathless adoration. So when Matt suggested that in a celebrated picture of a sea-beach the sea had no fluidity and was falling on the fishermen’s heads, he lost his temper and cried, sarcastically: “I think you had better open a school for R.A.’s, young man!”

Matt flushed, feeling he had been impertinent; then his sense of justice repudiated the rebuke. It was of no use pretending a thing was right when it wasn’t, he protested. He didn’t profess to get things right himself, and he only wished he could do anything half as good as the worst of these pictures. But he did know when he was wrong, even if it wouldn’t come right for all his sweating and fuming.

“A young man oughtn’t to talk till he can paint,” interrupted his uncle, severely.

“But you know what Dr. Johnson says, sir,” Matt remonstrated. “If you can’t make a plum-pudding, it’s no sign you can’t judge one.”

“Plum-puddings and pictures are very different things,” said Matthew Strang, stiffly, as though insulted by an implicit association with a pastry-cook.

“My, that’s ripping!” cried Matt, abandoning the argument at the sudden sight of a fine mellow piece of portrait-painting. “How the Old Masters got the grays! Oh, why don’t people wear wigs nowadays?”

This outburst of enthusiasm made the private exhibition close more auspiciously than had seemed probable, but Matt was never again invited to inspect the sacred treasures. His relations with his relatives came to be limited to morning visits to Herbert, whose stairs he ascended half secretly, to watch the progress of his cousin’s studies for an ambitious picture of “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar,” the models for which he also used himself. He left his own studies behind at Herbert’s request--though reluctantly, for he was not at all satisfied with them--as a species of payment for the privilege. When, through his interest in this coming masterpiece of Herbert’s, and under the fascination of this delightful and flattering friendship, he forgot his pride and fell into the habit of regular morning work in Herbert’s company, lunch somehow came up regularly for three, though Madame was not supposed to be aware of his presence. Those were joyous lunches, full of laughter and levity, made picturesque by the romantic dress or undress of the third party, and extra palatable for Matt--when his first reluctance wore off--by the fact that they saved dinners.

“Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” was intended for next year’s Academy, Herbert told him, and he gathered from his cousin’s casual observations that it had also to be submitted beforehand to the professors at the schools, for there were strange cramping conditions as to the size of the canvas and the principal figure. But he was less interested in its destination than in its draughtsmanship. He saw the tableau in his mind’s eye the moment Herbert told him he was engaged upon it, for the scene had often figured itself to his fancy in those far-off days when his mother read the Bible to her helpless children by random prickings. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream was one of the lucky chapters, to which Matt listened without distraction as the narrative unrolled itself pictorially before his inner vision. He rapidly sketched his conception, then found he disliked it, and ultimately remembered he had unconsciously reproduced the grouping of figures in the illustration in his mother’s Bible, one of those he had colored in his childish naughtiness. Herbert protested this was no drawback, but Matt went away brooding over a more artistic arrangement, and dreamed that he was mangled by lions in a den. But in the morning he brought a new grouping for Herbert’s consideration. This Herbert picked to pieces as being against the canons.

“Don’t forget it’s for the Academy,” he said. “We mustn’t make mistakes in grammar. Some of the old buffers are worse than Tarmigan.”

“Damn Tarmigan!” cried Matt, but he had to admit ruefully that his scheme was full of solecisms. He had by this time as full an acquaintance with the rules as his senior, but with Herbert they had become instinctive. It was with a renewed sense of inferiority to his cousin, paradoxically combined with an inward raging against the Lindley Murrays of art, that Matt abandoned point after point under Herbert’s searching criticism. Herbert’s gift of pulling other people’s ideas to pieces amounted to genius. But he abandoned his original sketch also, dismissed his projected models, and devoted himself to arguing out the composition afresh.

Under the banter of the art-critic smoking cynically on the sofa, Matt was put upon his mettle to group all the figures and dispose the lines so as to escape the pitfalls lurking on every side, and likewise satisfy the conditions of the pedantic professors.

“We must get as much subject as possible into it,” explained Herbert. “They give you such a small space--only fifty by forty--that you must crowd all you know into it.”

Gradually the composition took shape, with infinite discussion, daily renewed. Matt was for pillars with curious effects of architecture. Herbert objected that pillars would make the perspective too difficult, and only consented on the laughing stipulation that Matt should work out the angles. And Herbert was very averse from Matt’s suggestions of strange original attitudes for the figures.

“That ’ll make some awfully stiff foreshortening,” he grumbled.

“What does it matter? You’ll have models,” Matt would reply.

“It’s all very well. You haven’t got to do the work,” Herbert would retort.

And when the grouping was settled, the color and the drapery brought fresh argumentation, the young men working as at a chess problem till the puzzle of arriving at the original without deserting the Academic was solved. And as, in the solution of a chess problem by a pair of heads, the suggestion of the winning moves has been so obscured by the indefinite suggestion of abortive moves by both, that neither remembers to which the final discovery of the right track was due, so Matt would have been surprised to be told that the ideas that had been retained were all his, and the ideas that had been rejected were all Herbert’s. The thought of apportioning their shares in the final scheme never crossed his mind, even though it was his hand that always held the experimentative pencil. Indeed, the technical interest of the task had absorbed every other thought, and the details of the tentative were lost in the triumph of the achieved, and obscured as by a cigarette cloud of happy mornings.

And then Herbert told his father he must have new models fresh to studios.

“I don’t want ’em from Haverstock Hill or Lillie Road,” he said--”women who’ve been hung in every gallery. I don’t want your Italians from Hatton Garden, or professionals that any of the other fellows might get hold of and extract my ideas from. Besides, new faces will give me a better chance.”

And Matthew Strang the Elder recognized there was some reason in his son’s request; but he pointed out it was not so easy to go outside the stock families, especially for figure models, and that old hands often helped the painter. But Herbert easily overrode his objections. It was only the conventional attitudinizings and foreshortenings which they understood, the quotations of art, which he was now about to abandon in deference to paternal prejudice; and so Matthew Strang, morbidly solicitous, obediently brought picturesque Orientals for Daniel and the King and the satraps and the counsellors, and blushing brunettes for the beauties of the Court; and Herbert set to work to reproduce in large on the canvas Matt’s rough charcoal scheme of the whole, and his own or Matt’s studies of the parts; and when Herbert blundered, Matt suggested with pastel a change of tone or color or outline, sometimes even taking up the brush when Herbert was lazy--as Herbert often was. Matt was never surprised to find the work no more advanced than when he had gone away the morning before, for Herbert’s mind was on many and more important things. The Academy students were rehearsing a burlesque which he had written for their dramatic society, and he sometimes slipped out to the rehearsals, lamenting to Matt that, through his father’s insistence on steady work, he could not even play in his own piece. The only recreation allowed him was a ride in the Park on a hired hack, and even that, he grumbled, was to enable him to salute cantering R.A.’s. Sometimes he went to tea with the girl students at restaurants. Sometimes he went to balls, and was too tired on the day after to do anything but describe them. They were always painters’ dances; “The Old Gentleman blocks others,” he said. On one occasion the host was an R.A., whose son was a fellow-student at the schools, and then “The Old Gentleman chortled.”

Then there was the students’ ball, to which he convoyed Matt, who was quite dazzled by the elegance and refinement of the ladies, and almost afraid to speak to his partners, and torn afresh with envy of the beautiful life from which he had been, and must long be, shut out; not losing his discomfort till, after the supper (at which he tasted champagne for the first time), Herbert’s special circle danced the Lancers with a zest and _entrain_ that horrified some of the matrons, and brought back to Matt the dear old nights when he took the barn floor with little Ruth Hailey, under the placid gaze of the cows and amid the odors of the stable and the hay-mow.

For other memorable experiences, too, Matt was indebted to his easy-going cousin. There was Herbert’s club, the Bohemian, a cosey little place favored by actors and journalists, caricatures of whose sensuous faces lined the walls in company with oil-paintings and sketches more sensuous still. Matt felt measureless reverence for the men he brushed against here. He had seen some of them before in the illustrated papers which he read in shop-windows or penny news-rooms or Herbert’s studio, and he trembled lest they should detect, from his embarrassment amid the varied knives and forks and glasses, that he was only a boor with less education than the waiters. He wondered what the clever, cultured people--scraps of whose conversation floated across to him amid the popping of soda-water corks--would think if they knew he had planted potatoes, chopped logs, made sugar in the woods, and climbed masts and steeples. In the new snobbishness with which their society had infected him he could not see that these things were education, not humiliation, and he was glad that even Herbert knew little of his history, and asked less. Of other people’s histories, on the other hand, Matt heard a great deal. “Bubbles” had robbed him of his belief in royal virtue; in the smoking-room of the Bohemians society fell to pieces like a house of cards, in building which, as Herbert once said, the knaves alone had been used. It was a racing, dicing, drinking, swindling, fornicating fraternity, worm-eaten with hypocrisy. Sincerity or simplicity was “all my eye;” there was always money or a woman or position in the background.

“They talk a lot of scandal,” Matt once complained.

“My dear Matt,” remonstrated Herbert, “it’s not scandal; it’s gossip. Brixton gossips about who marries whom, Bohemia about who lives with whom. Scandal implies censure.”

Despite the scandal (or the gossip), Matt was full of curiosity to see this strange new life of clubs and restaurants and theatres (to which Herbert sometimes got paper admissions), this feverish realm of intellect and gayety, where nobody seemed to want for anything; but it sometimes came over him with an odd flash of surprise and bitterness, as he caught the gleam of white scented shoulders, or saw heavy-jowled satyrs swilling champagne, that all this settled luxury had been going on while he was tramping the snowy roads of what might have been another planet.

The feeling wore off as the London season advanced, and the tide of luxurious life rolled along the great sunny thoroughfares, or flecked the midnight streets with darting points of fire. His Puritan conscience, curiously persisting beneath all the scepticism engendered by his mother’s tragedy, had at first acquiesced but uneasily in the unscriptural view of life that seemed to prevail around him. But fainter and fainter grew its prickings, the sensuous in him ripened in this liberal atmosphere, and that Greek conception of a beautiful world which, budding for him in solitude, had been almost nipped by the same cruel tragedy, flowered now in the heats of an ardent city.

“The Old Gentleman” was in such good-humor at the surprising progress of Herbert’s “Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar” that Madame’s gentle remonstrance that he ought to do something for Matt touched a responsive chord, and before the Academy sending-in day Matt had the privilege of being escorted by his uncle, in company with Herbert, to a _conversazione_ at the Reynolds Club, of which the dealer was a member. Herbert was soon lost in the crush of second-rate painters and engravers and obscurely famous visitors who gathered before the members’ would-be Academy pictures that lined the walls, or the second-rate entertainers who struck attitudes on the daïs; but Matt was too nervous amid this congestion of celebrities to detach himself from his uncle, who did the honors grandly, pointing out the lions of the club with a proprietorial air. Matt could not but feel that his uncle (who was of the swallow-tailed minority) was himself one of the lions of the club, and in very truth he was its most distinguished-looking member. “The refreshments are not gratis,” he told Matt, “but of course you can have anything you like at my expense. Will you have a cup of coffee, or are you one of those degenerate young men who can’t live without whiskey-and-water?” But Matt had no appetite for anything; he was too fluttered by this close contact with the giants of the brush. He listened eagerly to morsels of their dialogue, strained his vision to see them through the smoky, lamplit air; critical as he might have been, and was, before their work, the men themselves were shrouded in a vague splendor of achievement. They had all been hung.

There seemed a good deal of talk about a virulent article of comprehensive condemnation in the art columns of the _Saturday Spectator_; everybody seemed to have read it and nobody to have written it. For the rest, compliments crossed like smiling couples in the quadrille.

“What a stunning landscape that is of yours, Rapper!” said Wilfred Smith, a journalist so ignorant of painting that he was suspected of art criticism. “Quite like a Corot.”

“Oh, it’s nothing; just knocked off for a color-blind old Johnny who admires me,” replied Rapper, deprecatingly. He was a moon-faced man with a double eyeglass on a gold cord. “It’s rotten, really; I’m awfully ashamed of it.” And he elbowed his way towards it.

“So he ought to be, and so ought you to be ashamed, Wilfred,” said Morrison, the poet of pessimism and music-halls. “It’s just like those splashes of silvery gray they sell for Corots on the Boulevards.”

“That’s what I meant,” said Wilfred. “Didn’t you see I was guying him? Hullo, Clinch, I’ve been admiring that water-color of yours. What an exquisite face the girl has!”

“It isn’t a water-color, you ---- fool; it’s a pastel,” said Clinch, gruffly.

“That’s what I meant--not an oil-color,” replied Wilfred, unabashed.

Matt stared with interest at the picture, which was just beside him. The face was indeed exquisite with the peculiar delicacy of pastel. He looked at the painter’s own face, coarse and splotched, the teeth fouled by endless tobacco. It was as though Pan should paint Psyche.

“I see the _Saturday Spectator_ doesn’t understand your ‘Carolina,’ Clinch,” said the poet, smiling.

Clinch damned the _Saturday Spectator_ in a string of unlovely oaths, which were drowned by the music of a violin and a piano. He did not care a twopenny damn what people scribbled about him; his pictures were there, just the same.

“But what does ‘Carolina’ mean, old man?” said the poet, appealingly.

Clinch replied that literary fellows were invariably sanguinary fools who fancied that painting meant things and could be explained in words. He had just been reading about the significance of Leonardo’s backgrounds in some rotten book on the Renaissance. In reality those bits of landscape must have been put in and painted out a dozen times before Leonardo had struck the color-harmony he tried after. Morrison retorted, that if the art-critic could paint he would become a partisan, tied to his own talent. As it was, he could approach other men’s pictures without prejudice.

“But also without knowledge,” Clinch replied, goaded. He pointed out brutally that to learn painting meant to learn a new set of symbols. “If you wanted to paint that lamp,” he said, “you’d probably put down a---- line to get that edge, and so lose all the---- softness. A real line wouldn’t look a---- bit like the real thing. Same with color; real red wouldn’t give red. Painting is all subterfuge, optical illusion. Color and form are only an affair of relations.”

He went on to explain, with punctilious profanities, that to study the relation of that lamp to the piano-lid was enough for a picture; treated perfectly, there would be a poetry and mystery about it. Beauty, too, was only an affair of relations, and in “Carolina” he had been trying to get a beautiful relation between two ugly things, and an early Georgian feeling into a nineteenth-century interior, with a scientific accuracy of tones known only to modern French art.

Matt listened eagerly, wincing a little at the livelier oaths, but conscious of piquant perspectives, of novel artistic vision, which, if not quite intelligible, was in refreshing contrast with Tarmigan’s old-fashioned orthodoxy.

“But you had the same woman in your picture of the ‘Salvation Lass,’” persisted the poet.

Clinch explained that if writing chaps knew what it was to hunt for a satisfactory model, they’d thank their stars they didn’t know a palette from a planchette. A “swell woman” that really expressed your idea you couldn’t get to sit for you, and if you could get her you couldn’t swear at her. Besides, it was his ambition to create a new type of feminine beauty, and impose her on his period--_une femme de Clinch_! Wilfred Smith took mental notes, prepared henceforward to expound Clinch to an ignorant world.

“It’s about time he got a new model, anyway,” he said, when the repulsive-looking artist had moved off.

“Or painted her,” added Morrison, dryly.

Matt had a flash of resentment. The picture was to him a dainty dream of cool color and graceful form. Despite his association with Herbert, he did not yet understand the temperament that strides to Wit over Truth’s body.

“Isn’t it funny a man like that should draw such refined women?” he could not help remarking to his cicerone.

Matthew Strang assumed an oracular expression. “Art’s just a knack,” he said. “You’ve got to be born with it. I wasn’t, more’s the pity; but Herbert makes up for it, thank Heaven! Art’s got nothing to do with character. I’ve paid many a man to do me so many easel-pictures a year, and do you suppose I ever got them? The rogues get drunk or die or something, but they never come up to time.”

Matt was puzzled. If Art demanded anything, it seemed to him it was steadfastness and sobriety. The truth about it seemed to lie in those lines he had read in a volume of Matthew Arnold, borrowed from Herbert:

“Young, gay,
Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.”

A sudden fear that he was not a genius himself was like a vivisector’s knife through his heart, laying bare with painful incision its secret hope.

“Do you think Clinch gets his effects without bothering?” he asked, with anxiety.

“O heavens! no,” said Matthew Strang, authoritatively. “I once watched him at work. He was squatted on a tiny stool, looking up at his picture, and painting upward. He had a cigarette in his mouth, which he was always relighting. Every now and then he would sigh heavily, or swear at himself or his model, and sometimes he would go and lie on the hearth-rug and stare solemnly at the canvas; then jump up, give one touch, swear if it went wrong, paint it out, and then go and stand in the corner with his face to the wall, probably in meditation, but looking exactly like a naughty little boy at school.”

Matt smiled, half at the picture of Clinch in the corner, half from relief at finding that even men who swore and drank far more than he did suffered quite as acutely in the parturition of the Beautiful. He fell back on the theory of an essential inner delicacy behind the occasionally coarse envelope of artistic genius, just as grossness could lurk beneath a gentlemanly refinement.

They ultimately found Herbert in the billiard-room, with a cue in one hand and a “soda-and-whiskey” in the other. “I don’t want to look at the pictures,” he protested. “If they’re decent I’ll see them in the Academy, and if they’re rot it’s waste of time seeing them at all. As for the entertainment, you can get a better at any music-hall--at least, so I’ve been told.” Nevertheless, he himself took Matt to another _conversazione_ the same week, the far more homely gathering of the St. George’s Sketching Club, where the refreshments _were_ gratis and evening dress was taboo, and really famous people scrambled for the bread-and-cheese and beer, of which there was not enough, and members disported themselves in their models’ costumes for the edification of a company which had turned its back on their pictures. For the Academy itself Matt paid his shilling, into such extravagant habits had he slipped since the days of his arrival in London, when a National Gallery catalogue was beyond his far fatter purse. But he came away much less inspired than from that momentous visit, his imagination untouched, save once or twice, as by Erle-Smith’s personalized projections of mediæval romance, in which the absence of real atmosphere seemed only natural. There were so many smooth portraits of uninteresting people that he was reminded drearily of his Nova-Scotian drudgery, when his heaven-scaling spirit had to stoop to portray and please some tedious farmer who was sometimes not even picturesque. It did not occur to him how unfair was the latent comparison with the National Gallery; he forgot that Art is short and the Academy long, that one can no more expect a batch of great pictures every year than a batch of great novels or of great symphonies.

Tarmigan had a picture of “The Rape of the Sabines.” It was hung on the line, and Grainger’s was very proud of it. In the discussion on the Academy (which supplied the class with the materials for a fortnight’s carping) it was the only picture that escaped even “Bubbles’s” depreciation, though he declared he would never himself paint like that, which the curly-headed wag eagerly admitted. One of the students had secured a place in the “skies,” and his success made Matt regret he himself had not dared to send in.

Grainger’s own contribution had been rejected, which made his pupils think more highly of themselves.

Matt was more interested in the Azure Art Gallery, a little exhibition (mainly of landscapes with violet shadows) held by some young men about whom Herbert was enthusiastic; for they did not attempt, said he, to vie either with the camera or the conte. “If painting be an art at all,” he contended, “it can only be so by virtue of ignoring Nature. As Goethe said, ‘We call art Art because it is not Nature.’ The musician works up notes, the poet syllables into a music unlike anything in Nature, and so must the painter work up Nature’s colors and forms under the sole guidance of his artistic instinct. And whatever can be better expressed in words has no place in painting. These young men’s pictures tell no stories, and no truths either. They are merely concerned with color and line.”

Matt afterwards found that, with the exception of a couple of Scotchmen, these young men by no means accepted Herbert’s account of their aims; indeed, they rather regarded it as satirical, for to give truer impressions of Nature was precisely their boast and glory. Although Matt could not always credit them with success in this, still he found a note of life and fantasy in their work. He was especially struck by Cornpepper’s “Chimney on Fire in Fitzroy Street”--a flight of sparks falling and curving in a golden rain, in vivid contrast with the dark, starlit sky above and the black mass of spectators below, faintly illumined by street-lamps, and broken at the extreme end by the brassy gleam of the fire-engine tearing up the street. There were inaccuracies of detail, but Matt was immensely impressed by the originality of the subject and the touch of weirdness, and it was with joy that he accepted Herbert’s offer to take him to the Azure Art Club, where Cornpepper and his clique mostly forgathered. Since Herbert had misinterpreted them to his cousin, Matt had read a good deal about them in the papers, and they had held forth brilliantly to interviewers on the veracity of their rendering of Nature, Cornpepper going so far as to claim that you could not look at his landscapes without feeling--from the color of stone and sea, from the tints of the sky and the disposition of the clouds--what o’clock it was. Whereupon the interviewer had consulted a study of poppies on a cliff, and reported that it was half-past eleven, Cornpepper crying “Correct!” All of which did not fail to provoke counterblasts from the Academic camp and from the irresponsible concocters of facetious paragraphs.

It was all very small--the feeble British refraction of the great Gallic battle then waging, of the campaign of plein air and modern subject against bituminous landscapes and classic conventions, the expurgated English edition of the eternal battle of youth and age, spiritless as the bouts of boxers in a Quaker land, _sans_ prize-rings or hero-worshippers; the shadowy warfare of art in a Puritan country vibrating only to politics and religion, indifferent to style, gauging literature merely by its message and art by its idea.

But Matt was not a true-born Briton, and his own aversion from an unreal Nature doctored and tricked up, in which an artificial chiaroscuro took the place of observation and atmosphere, led him into instant sympathy with this painting of “real moments,” with this presentation of “Nature caught in the fact,” as Cornpepper brilliantly defined the Impressionism he had smuggled over from Paris. Even if Nature was not so violet as she was painted, Matt felt the mistake was on the right side. And who but Cornpepper had revealed and interpreted the mystery and poetry of the night? True, he was rather staggered to remember, it was impossible to paint the night with your eye on the object. The night side of Nature might be caught in the fact; it could not be arrested in the fact.

Herbert was not a member of the Azure Art Club; they had to call on a man in Kensington to get him to take them there. He proved to be no other than the moon-faced Rapper, whom Herbert had invited to invite them to dinner.

“He’s an awful duffer,” he said, enviously, “but he has a flat of his own and an income of his own, and he’s had the run of Copenhagen, Paris, and Antwerp. They say Copenhagen is worse than Paris.”

Rapper made them stay to admire his rooms. “Don’t look at my pictures,” he said; “that’s only a portrait I’m doing of Riggs, the bucket-shop keeper. I’m an awful duffer; why I should get so many commissions at a hundred and fifty guineas when there’s lots of geniuses starving, I never can make out. I suppose it’s because I don’t want the money--I shall only blue it at Monte Carlo. I’ve only just come back from the country--a J.P., an awful screw. He made me do him and his wife for two-fifty. Still, they’re only half-lengths. Do try some of this Burgundy; it’s genuine. I import it direct from a small grower. I get a huge barrel for five pounds, and pay three pounds duty, and get hundreds of bottles out of it. People don’t know how to get wine in England. Oh, do please look at that Limoges enamel over the mantel-piece, Mr. Strang; it’s far better worth looking at than that daub of a library.”

“I always prefer to look at pictures,” said Matt, apologetically.

“It _is_ rather a strong bit of color,” admitted Rapper.

“Yes. Do you think the light is accounted for?” asked Matt. “That red glow--”

“Don’t you see the library lamp?” rejoined Rapper.

“Yes, but the shade’s off; and even then, isn’t it more like firelight?”

“Not a bit of it!” replied Rapper, hotly. “Do you suppose I didn’t study the effects with a lighted lamp? That’s a good bit of action in the old scholar’s arm, reaching for the book.”

Matt examined it carefully.

“The forearm is a little out of drawing, isn’t it--a little too long?” he asked, timidly.

“My dear fellow, the model had an unusually long forearm. You don’t suppose everybody is alike. Of course it isn’t near finished yet. But really I was trying for color more than for line; and, after all, it’s the careless draughtsmanship of a man who can draw. It attracted quite a lot of notice at the Azure Art Gallery last year, but I put a big price on it, so that it shouldn’t sell, and I’d have time to work it up. That’s a little bust of myself; it’s only plaster of Paris bronzed over. I model ever so much better than I paint, but nobody will give me a commission. Isn’t it funny? Do have some more of the Burgundy. I’m not much of an artist, but I flatter myself I do know a good wine.”

Before they left he presented them with photographs of his library picture, apparently forgetting that he hadn’t near finished it.

“I say, I can’t go about with you if you go on like this,” whispered Herbert to Matt, as Rapper lingered to extinguish his gas and lock his door. “Fancy telling a chap his faults. You mustn’t go by me and my Nebuchadnezzar. I rather like to be pitched into. It keeps a fellow from getting conceited.”

“I didn’t know,” Matt murmured, with a new admiration for Herbert, who had already become a hero to him, moving so brilliantly amid all these shining circles. The three young men got into a hansom and smoked Rapper’s cigars. At the little club, which was only ten minutes off, they dined in a long, narrow, drab-painted room, with a billiard-table near the door. Several men, whose work Matt had studied with interest, were dining in their vicinity. Matt strained his ears to catch their conversation, but it seemed to be all about the billiard-table, an apparently recent acquisition. At last, to his joy, he was introduced to some of the most famous--to Butler, tall, dark, muscular, and frock-coated, most erratic of etchers, most slap-dash of painters; to the foul-mouthed, dainty-fingered Clinch; to Gurney, slim, youthful, and old-faced, habited in tweeds, the latest recruit, an earnest disciple of every master in turn, old or new, always in superlatives of eulogy or abuse, and untaught by his own gyrations to respect a past adoration or to tone down a present; to Greme, more barefacedly boyish than even Herbert, a blonde youth credited by his admirers with a charming new blond vision of Nature, though the Philistines contended that all he did was to get water-color effects with oils; to Simpson, who ground his own colors, and had mysterious glazes and varnishes, and was consumed by an unshared anxiety as to the permanence of his pictures; and--oh, awful joy!--to the great Cornpepper, the most brilliant and the youngest of them all, a squat, juvenile figure, with a supercilious eye-glass in the right eye, a beak-like nose, and a habit of rasping the middle of his seat with his hands, like an owl on a perch. Matt was dying to talk to them--and especially to Cornpepper--of their art; as to men who had already done something in the world through which they moved, burdened with aspirations and haloed with dreams. But the talk would not veer round to painting, and the evening was entirely devoted to a general game of shell-out with halfpenny points. Matt was drawn into taking a cue, and lost one and threepence halfpenny in the first game, his inexperience being aggravated by Herbert’s whispered caution not to cut the cloth. However, his skilled eye and hand, practised with gun and brush, soon told, and he won his money back in the second, much to his relief, for his funds were running away at an appalling rate. The strenuous leaders of the newest art movement relaxed over the green table, highly hilarious as the white ball ran among the red balls like a sheep-dog, to drive them into the pockets, and stamping and contorting themselves in mock applause after a failure to score.

“That’s a fluke!” Herbert would say when the failure was his, and the jest became a catchword provocative of perpetual cachinnation.

There were so many hands in the game that Matt had plenty of time for occasional remarks between his turns, but nobody would speak of art except a venerable graybeard named Brinkside, who talked to him enthusiastically of the Azure Art campaign. He told him of the heroism of its leaders: of how Cornpepper had lived on dates and water while doing black-and-white illustrations for the _Christian Home_, salvation subjects at starvation prices; of how the even sturdier Butler had slept in a stable-loft, refusing to compromise with his genius or to modify the great dabs of paint that the world mistook for daubs. In answer to Matt’s inquiries, the old man explained to him how Cornpepper painted his night scenes, by putting down at fever heat in the morning some beautiful effect noted and absorbed the night before. In the evening Cornpepper would return to the spot, Brinkside said; but if, despite all his waiting, he could not see the same effect, he would wilfully forget the second impression, and return again and again till the first conditions were repeated. Matt, relieved to find that Cornpepper’s method was similar to his own, and that genius had no esoteric prerogatives of method, pointed out that in Nature’s infinite permutations an effect never recurred exactly as before, and that, therefore, he, for his part, contented himself with storing up in his mind the main values and color-planes, relying on deduction for the minutiæ. But, of course, it all depended on holding the total effect, the original sensation, vividly in the memory. On leaving he thanked Brinkside with touching humility for the instructive interest of his conversation.

“Funny to find an old man in a new movement,” he observed, suddenly, to Herbert, in their homeward hansom.

“Why not? Old men often creep in. It’s their last chance. But if it’s Brinkside you’re thinking of, he’s not an artist at all. He’s an artists’ colorman, who supplied ’em with their materials on tick before they caught on. Brinkside’s like a dress-maker I used to know at Brighton, who financed lovely woman till she married wealthy flats. He foresaw they would get on, and, by Jove, they are blazing away like a house on fire, or, perhaps I ought to say, like a chimney on fire.”

“Then the opposition to the Academy is flourishing!” cried Matt, joyfully. His vague, youthful sympathy with all that was fresh and young was strengthened and made concrete by the revelations of struggle and starvation in the lives of those that had preceded him, martyred for the faith that was in them.

“Yes, it is flourishing,” said Herbert; “so much so that in ten years’ time most of ’em will be Academicians or Associates. If I were the governor I’d buy ’em up now; but he’s got no insight.”

“Oh,” said Matt, disappointed. “Do you mean the Academy will win, after all?”

“Six of one and half a dozen of t’other. They’ll be half accepted and half toned down. Already Greme and Butler are married--and that’s the beginning of the end. Lucky beggars! supplied with enthusiasm in their youth, and comfort in their old age. I wish I was young myself.”

“What nonsense!”

“I never was young,” said Herbert, shaking his head. “I always saw through everything. Heigho! Give us a light from your cigar. I’ve sighed mine out.”

“I suppose they’re very grateful to Brinkside,” said Matt, when the fire of Herbert’s cigar was rekindled.

“They play billiards with him, but I don’t suppose they’ve squared up yet.”

“But they’re making money now,” urged Matt, horrified. Years of bitter slavery to domestic liabilities had unfitted him to understand this laxity of financial fibre.

“And then? Why be rash? One can’t foresee the future.”

Before the magnificence of this rebuke Matt shrank abashed; he had a sneaking twinge of shame and concern for his own homely honesty, as for something inauspiciously inartistic.

“Talking of money,” went on Herbert, “I’m devilish hard up myself for a day or two--bills to meet at once, and my allowance don’t come due for a few days. You couldn’t advance me a trifle, I suppose?”

“Of course I could,” said Matt, eagerly.

“Do you think you could let me have a pony?”

“A pony?” repeated Matt, mystified.

“Twenty-five pounds. Don’t do it if it will at all inconvenience you.”

Matt was glad that it was too dark for Herbert to read his face. The sum was by far the greater portion of his worldly possessions. But he did not hesitate. Herbert would refund it in a day or two.

“I will bring it to the studio to-morrow,” he said.

“That’s a good chap,” said Herbert. “By-the-way, we’ve got to go to Cornpepper’s studio next Sunday week.”

“Really?” cried Matt, in delighted excitement.

“Yes; he told me he didn’t like to ask you direct, because you looked so serious and strait-laced.”

“Oh!” protested Matt, with a vague sense of insult.

“Well, you do, there’s no denying it. Remember how you preached to me about the governor the first time you saw me. Perhaps you’ll go lecturing Cornpepper because he economizes by domesticating his model when he has a big picture on the easel. Personally, I like Cornpepper; he is the only fellow who has the courage of his want of principles in this whitewashed sepulchre of a country. But be careful that you don’t talk to him as you did to Rapper, for he lives up to his name. He is awfully peppery when you tread on his corns, though he has no objection to stamping on yours. Not that I believe there’s any real malice in him, but they say his master at the Beaux-Arts was a very quarrelsome fellow, and my opinion is that he models himself on him, and thinks that to quarrel with everybody is to be a great artist.”

“Oh, but don’t you think he _will_ be a great artist?” said Matt.

“He _is_ a great artist, but he won’t be,” said Herbert. “He’ll be an R.A. By Jove! we nearly ran over that Guardsman. Mary Ann has been standing him too many drinks. Do you know the price of a Guardsman, Matt?”

“The price?”

“Yes; a nurse-maid who wishes to be seen walking out with a swagger soldier has to give him half a crown and his beer.”

Herbert never lost an opportunity of showing off to Matt his knowledge of the inner working of the great social machine. Madame, passing her white hand lovingly over her boy’s hair, had no idea of the serpentine wisdom garnered in the brain beneath.

At the Marble Arch, Matt, carefully bearing the photograph of Rapper’s “Library,” got out of the hansom to exchange to a ’bus which passed near his street. He offered to pay his share of the hansom, but Herbert waved the silver aside with princely magnificence.