Chapter XXIII: Book III: Chapter I

CONQUEROR OR CONQUERED?

Foresight is insight. It was due to Matthew Strang’s ignorance of life and of himself that his marriage in no way turned out as he had calculated. Oh, the fatal mistake of it, perceived as soon as it was too late, though he shrank weakly from the perception, afraid to face the chill, blank truth, hoping against hope that love would be the child of marriage. Oh, the ghastliness of being chained to a loving woman he did not love, bound by law and honor to simulate a responsive affection, and to hide the deadly apathy which her caresses could not overcome. He tried hard to love her, calling his own attention to her youth, her freshness, her prettiness, her flashes of expression, making the most of every hint of charm, seeing her through a wilful glamour, even attempting to persuade himself that she was the woman of his dreams; all the while his leaden heart coldly refusing itself to the hollow pretence. Before the marriage he had almost felt on the point of love; but it was only, he knew later, the self-disguise of cupidity and mercenariness, though no doubt a measure of gratitude had helped to becloud his vision. In his bachelor days he could never have imagined such indifference to any woman. Sometimes he wondered if this was all marriage meant to any man, but a wistful incredulity denied him the consolation of acquiescence in a common lot. The testimony of mankind was quite other, and his own yearning instinct refused to look upon his union as typical. If only she had been a little more intellectual, less limited to gossip about servants and prices! How he had deceived himself, taking the sprightliness of a young girl in love, the coquettish gayety, the evanescent brilliancy of a bird in the pairing season, for the output of perennial intellect and good-humor! He had lived so much alone with his dreams that he had fallen out of touch with humanity, and particularly with feminine humanity. He had had no standard of comparison by which to gauge her, and once united to her, the habitual recluse could not accommodate himself to her constant companionship.

What an irony their honey-moon in Paris, in Florence, the ardors of artistic renascence yoked with the blankness of boredom! Despite Rosina’s affectionate clinging to him, and her almost pathetic endeavor to admire old churches and dingy picture-galleries, it was a relief to both when she at last acquiesced in his happy idea of regarding his rounds as “work,” and, under the convoy of Billy, beguiled the expectation of fonder reunion by the more exhilarating spectacle of the streets and the endless glories of the _Bon Marché_. And very soon she wearied altogether of foreign places, clamoring to be settled in London, where the language was not gibberish, and one could go a-marketing without being bamboozled and cut off from bargaining. For after the first fervors of the honey-moon she had developed that instinct for petty economy which had amused and charmed him when he had gone shopping with her in Halifax, but which now fretted him, seeming like a daily reproach for all those great sums her acquisition of him had cost her. He was glad that the due arrival of the second mysterious instalment promised to the Nova-Scotian household relieved him of the painful necessity of applying to her on its behalf. Unexpectedly enough this sum was supplemented by a dividend of a hundred and fifteen dollars paid to him, after he had forgotten all about the matter, by the trustee in Halifax in settlement of his claim against the estate of the Starsborough ship-builder.

In vain he tried to interest his wife in books, in the poems and essays, in the study of French and German, into which he now threw himself with a feverish desire for culture. In vain he tried to impart to her his vision of nature, to get her to observe scenery and sunsets. Colors and shades were only interesting to her as they occurred in dress materials. Once when they stood by a sea-beach on a December afternoon under a cold, gray sky, and Rosina complained of the dreariness of the seascape, he had attempted to show her how beautiful it really was, how much more interesting to the artistic eye than a crude sunlight effect; how nearest the horizon it was grayish steel-blue, and then a still amber, and then emerald green, and how just before the final fringe of both there shone a band of sparkling amber, grayed by cloud-reflections. But Rosina shivered, and refused to see anything but a chill green waste.

She would not even allow him to arrange her furniture, and a pair of colossal pink vases, garishly hand-painted with pastoral figures (picked up “a bargain”), were a permanent pain to him, spoiling for him the drawing-room of the little North London house with the rude whitewashed studio, in which they had settled down after the birth of their first child. The temporary lull that attended their installation in British domesticity was succeeded by graver frictions when Rosina had finished furnishing. They had no society; neither of the couple knew anybody in London, and the husband shrank from making friends, constrained, moreover, by his art to a solitary way of living. Rosina, who before her child demanded her care had sat to him out of pure desire to be with him, began to be jealous of the models who replaced her, declaring that she had had no conception such goings-on were a part of art or she would never have married him.

The only alleviation of his numb misery was his ability to paint without pecuniary under-thought the picture with which he was to storm the Academy, to throw all his individuality into it. The very seclusion of his life favored this devotion to his ideals.

And these ideals were only partially those of his celibate. He had been swaying to and fro under the opposite solicitations of Idealism and Realism; now in a violent upheaval, his sympathy with modern subjects and even with modern methods had been submerged.

On the Continent for the first time he came into contact with the Old World. London had been to him as modern as America, repeating its ideas and ideals, but in France, and more especially in Italy, the mere variation of tongues helped to draw him into an earlier world, co-operated with the appeal of ancient churches and streets and palaces, and the countless treasure of ancient Art. The modern world grew hateful to him, and he absorbed by affinity the ancient and the mediæval. At bottom it was not so much the modern that repelled him as real life, and it was not so much the past towards which he yearned as towards that timeless realm wherein ideal beauty dwells. The past was at least less real than the present. Real life was horrible, and marriage had put the coping-stone on his dissatisfaction with it. From birth to death it was embased by a sordid series of physical processes. Even the much-vaunted love was hideous at root. Beauty itself was never really perfect, and was transient at best, while the beautiful idea that lurked in nearly every human face and figure had for the most part been left embryonic. Only in Art could the imperfections of Nature be corrected--and this was the Artist’s mission, not to imitate Nature, but to transcend her; from her faulty individuals, frail and perishable, to draw types of perfection, flawless, immortal, like that Venus de Milo, which stood at the end of the Louvre passage, beautiful from every standpoint, fixing in its pensive sweetness of spiritualized form his dream of Ideal Womanhood; or like that mighty torso of winged Victory that had achieved the last victory over its own mutilation. Real life was Deacon Hailey and his mad mother and Billy and Rosina and his uncle and the grimy denizens of the London slums and the blackguardly crowd at the Fleet Street public-house and the lewd workmen in the Starsborough ship-yard. But Art was Rosalind and Imogen, Hamlet and Ariel, Don Quixote and Beatrix Esmond, and the love in Shelley’s lyrics, and the music of Beethoven, and the pictures of Botticelli, and the cold white statues of the Greeks--that imaginary world which man’s soul had called into being to redress the balance of the Real. It was Art against Nature throughout--the immortal shadows against the ephemeral realities.

“She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.”

And so for the “real atmosphere” of Cornpepper he no longer cared: what mattered the realities of space more than those of time to the soul, emperor of its own fantasy? All this scientific precision after which he had been hankering--was it not irrelevant to Art? The Beautiful was the Ideal; to create the Ideal, the Real must be passed through the crucible of the Artist’s soul. The Artist was the true creator. In him Nature’s yearning to beget the Beautiful became conscious. She herself had infinite failures--ugly moods, fogs, glooms, skies of iron, seas of tin. And feeling all this instinctively rather than by a lucid excogitation, he was now for the ideal, for the romantic, for the religious even, for anything that was not real, that shut out the unbeautiful necessity, as those glorious stained windows of cathedrals, blazing with saints, shut out the crude daylight and the raw air of reality, filtering the garish sunlight to that dim religious light in which the soul could see best. Ah, how wisely the poor human soul had fenced itself in against the bleak realities--even as the body had housed itself against the inhospitalities of Nature--painting its windows with beautiful dreams, with an incarnate Love that ruled the world, and an image of immaculate Motherhood. And in a strange hybrid, hazy blend of Catholicism and Hellenism, possible only to an artist who sees things by their sensuous outsides, the Venus de Milo and the Madonna of the Italian masters were to him more akin by beauty than divorced by dogma. In a sense they were one--the highest types of Beauty conceivable by the Pagan and Christian ages, so akin that when Botticelli came to draw Venus, as in his “Nascita di Venere,” his brush fashioned a meek Miltonic Eve, prefiguring the Virgin Mother, while Andrea del Sarto, in his Annunziazone in the “Pitti,” had given the Virgin Mother almost the brooding serenity of a Greek goddess. Ideal Womanhood, Ideal Womanhood, this was what poor Matthew Strang seemed to find in either--ay, and even in Perugino’s “Magdalen,” and the saying of Keats, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” seemed to him to be indeed all that mortals needed to know.

But that Pagan serenity which had produced Greek art could not be his. For him as for the ages the first sensuous joy in beauty was over. And what appealed even more than the Greek marbles to the artist who had set out from his native village with quick blood, worshipper of a beautiful world, was that subtler art which expressed rather the inadequacy than the perfection of life; the wistfulness of a Botticelli Madonna, the unfathomable smile of a Leonardo portrait, the pensive melancholy of Lorenzo di Credi’s “Unknown Youth” in the Uffizi, or the mystic aspiration of the monk in that famous “Concerto di Musica,” and inversely Raphael’s lovelier line than Nature’s, and Michael Angelo’s with its more majestic sweep. He longed with that yearning, with which the boy had looked up to the stars in the midnight forest, for God, for Christ, for Apollo, for some dream of whiteness and beauty, for something that persisted beneath all the purposeless generations of which the Louvre held record in those cumbrous relics of vanished civilization--Egyptian, Phœnician, Syrian, Babylonian, Persian, Chaldean--those broken shafts of pillars that had upheld barbaric temples, those friezes that had adorned the façades of palaces, those blurred monuments perpetuating the victories of forgotten dust, those faded bass-reliefs that had pleased the lustful eyes of nameless kings, enthroned in their gigantic halls, those uncouth torsos of bulls and sphinxes, emblems of a vaster, crueller life. Amid the flux of the centuries the visibles of Art, the invisibles of Religion--were not these the only true Realities?

Such had been Matthew Strang’s thoughts, as in a deep silence he walked through the Louvre with Rosina, a silence that was at its deepest when he responded to her chatter. She hated the slippery parquet and the dull oil-colors under the glazed skylight, preferring the fresh coloring of the copies, though she made fun of the copyists who sat so patiently on their stools. What queer men, what funny, frumpy girls, what strange old ladies! And, look! there was a young woman in widows’ weeds, painting such a cute picture, and--gracious! there was quite a young girl copying a naked man--weren’t they horrid, the French? She liked the attendants’ cocked hats with a dash of gilt, and enjoyed the desultory crowd of perambulating spectators, that ranged from old gentlemen hobbling along on sticks to artisans in red blouses and clayey boots. And wouldn’t Matt come back into the jewelry and china departments, which were really interesting? And wasn’t the heat unbearable? It was her restlessness that made her husband quit this Paris which fascinated him, this beautiful city, with whose artistic activity, divined from the mere architecture of the École des Beaux Arts, he had had no opportunity to get into intimate touch; for he could not even come across Herbert, whom he had rather hoped to find still there, a cicerone to initiate him into the art-coteries of Paris. In Florence, where they went for the winter, Rosina was even more restless. The towered palaces, the Duomo, and the gracious Campaniles, the gardens, the enchanting environs, and all the stock wonders of the place, had none but a superficial interest for her; they were exhausted at first sight; amid the marble calm of colonnades she even regretted the liveliness of the Boulevards. And the climate, too, was worse than that of Paris; her grumblings were perpetual. To pass from the warm piazza or promenade to the biting wind of the narrow streets was not only uncomfortable, but made it a problem how to dress. And, indeed, Matt himself suffered keenly from the cold; though there was a small brass heating apparatus in the centre of the gallery, it scarcely did more than keep his colors from congealing. For he was copying Botticelli’s “Virgin with the Child and Angels.” Yes, Botticelli had become his master--Botticelli, whom at first sight in the National Gallery he had rejected for insufficient draughtsmanship, but all of whose naïve exaggerations, of hands or feet or necks, he now credited to artistic intention, prepared to maintain from loving study of his delicately luminous canvases and his blond ethereal frescos that the Master’s drawing had only repudiated the bonds of the Real in quest of a higher beauty, a more gracious harmony of curves, even as his coloring had refined away that oleaginous quality which a Rubens found in human flesh. To brood over a Madonna of Botticelli or of Filippo Lippi, Matthew Strang would turn from the women of Rubens or the young men of Titian or the children of Velasquez or Rembrandt’s old men. Though at the sight of “Les Glaneurs” of Millet he felt a lurking sympathy in his submerged self, he preferred that morning landscape of Corot, in which bodiceless beauties dance round trees as half-dressed women never did in any period of French history. He found a winter scene of Van Ostade’s none the less charming because the figures were not enveloped, and the lights were untruly set off by bituminous shadows. He was in the mood in which even the gilded rose-nudity of the eighteenth century seemed precious. Amid the infinitude of Art that surrounded him now, Cornpepper’s cocksureness seemed to him as futile as it had already appeared amid the infinity of Nature. And all the Masters were so akin that evolution by revolution seemed less credible than in the smoky atmosphere of Azure Art studios. Modern subject? Had they not all done the contemporary, had the Dutch done anything else? Impressionism? In so far as it meant a free brush-work, was not Rembrandt an Impressionist? Was not Velasquez in his later manner?

His first picture, then, need not be revolutionary in technique, but it must be more imaginative than the bulk of English work in the Academy of his day, more emotional. Photography had reduced realism to absurdity, had proved that Art lay in the transfusion of Nature through the artist’s soul. And the essence of all art was emotion, feeling. The work of Art was but the medium by which the artist passed on his emotion to the spectator, his joy in beauty, his feeling for nature, his sadness, his aspiration, even his view of life. Because emotion could be conveyed by literature and music, there was no reason why these should have the preference in cases where painting was equal to conveying it, too. Without emotion a picture was null and void; technique by itself could give works of craft, never works of Art. On the other hand, to have the artistic emotion without the technique necessary to pass it on to the spectator was to be artistic, but not an artist.

The choice of a subject gave him much harassing hesitation; it brought delicious peace merely to make his final decision amid all the whirl of ideas that pressed upon him. He would found his picture on those beautiful lines in Matthew Arnold’s “Forsaken Merman.”

“Once she sat with you and me
On a red-gold throne in the heart of the sea,
And the youngest sat on her knee.
She combed its bright hair, and she tended it well,
When down swung the sound of a far-off bell.
She sighed, she look’d up through the clear green sea;
She said: ‘I must go, for my kinsfolk pray
In the little gray church on the shore to-day.
’Twill be Easter-time in the world--ah me!
And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee.’”

The subject seemed to him made to his hand. It would enable him to fulfil his young ambitious dream of reconciling the decorative with the idea-picture; the composition should weave a beautiful pattern, and the coloring a scheme of harmony, and yet the picture should make a distinct emotional appeal. A woman, with a soul, throned amid a lower race, yet yearning for the higher spiritual fervors--that was an idea which lent itself beautifully to pictorial expression: a literary idea doubtless, but yet a visual, too, so that there was no need even to label it with the poet’s lines which had suggested it; it should be self-explanatory. And what sensuous glow in the accessories--the clear, green sea-depths, the red-gold throne, the child’s flowing hair! The thought of them was like wine in his veins. He set to work eagerly on a large scale, informed by his contemplation of the Old Masters with big ambitions--to do, not the little lyrics that satisfied contemporary cocksureness, but a great sustained poem.

What pleasures and pains the work brought him! The thrill of conception was deadened by inadequacy of execution, to revive when some charm of color and line flowered under happy accident. He had great joy in doing the heart of the sea with its “deep, divine, dark dayshine”--it was his sympathy with this marine fairy-land that had partly inspired his readiness to do old Coble’s misleading ensign of the shark and the sponge-diver. Around the red-gold throne of the Merman’s bride that stood on the sand-strewn sea-bed the submarine flora bloomed in strange, fantastic arabesques and subtle shades of amber and gray and white and crimson, and through the green translucent water, spent sunbeams quivered and gleamed, and vague tropical fish shot lovely notes of color, and a sea-snake coiled its glittering mail; and there were strange pied amorphous creatures and moss-like corallines and red-branching madrepores and gleaming shells, and mother-o’-pearl touched with purple and azure, yet all strictly subordinated to the two central figures of the composition--the throned woman with her youngest on her knee, which, despite the nudity and the strange accessories, took on a curious likeness to the Madonna and Child. The canvas indeed showed the influence upon him of those wistful Madonnas he had pored over so wistfully; the cold, strange eyes of the golden-haired child were in the imaginative vein of the poem, the form of the throned woman was inspired by merely Pagan ideals of beauty; and yet the yearning in her uplifted eyes for the world of prayer whose sound floated mystically down to her was the same that showed in the eyes of the Holy Mother. But this analogy was not consciously in the artist’s design, though it had doubtless influenced his choice of subject, nor, though he had certainly had in mind to suggest through her the yearning of humanity for a higher world, did he connect his work with the school of Symbolists which was just arising across the Channel, and which was capable of finding in the dominant green of his sea the color-symbol of Resurrection. Even the dead face which he had placed in a corner in the foreground, though it might well seem symbolic of the tragedy lurking amid this sensuous beauty, was in truth only the dead face of his father, and he had put it in less for its symbolic significance or its realistic appositeness than from an uncontrollable desire to have it there, as though thus to dispossess his mind of that ancient haunting image which the continuous thought of the sea had inevitably brought up again. He told himself it was but natural some drowned face should bob ghastly in this submarine paradise, but in reality he felt a morbid craving to put it there, to have something in his picture for himself alone, that no one else in the great wide world could possibly understand to the full.

For the rest the picture cost him infinite trouble, for his genius was an incapacity for not taking infinite pains. The poetry of paint is achieved by the prose of work, and as despite his Romanticism his hankerings for the Real persisted, his ambitious conception entailed much preliminary study, and the setting up in his studio of a little sea-water aquarium, in the construction of which his ancient experience at the Stepney bird-stuffing establishment in making cases of shells with mosses and sea-weeds and coral came in unexpectedly useful. But he could not get a satisfactory model for his principal figure, and curiously enough her left hand gave him more vexation than anything else in this complex composition. He could not settle its pose, scraped out finger after finger with an old sailor’s knife, relic of his mackerel-fishing voyage, specially ground down, painted out the whole hand fourteen times, and at last in despair weakly solved the problem by hiding the hand altogether. Two days later, working on the scales of the sea-snake that basked sinuously at the woman’s feet, he suddenly had a last furious dash at the refractory hand. This time it came right and brought rejoicing. Sometimes he seemed at the mercy of these haphazard inspirations; what came, came, quite irrespective of conscious will and training. “Als ixh Xan” (as I can), the old Flemish motto which Van Eyck put to his work, seemed to him apt for any painter.

When he began “The Merman’s Bride” he was already much more exigent towards himself than in his younger days; self-criticism had checked that fearless execution; by the time he had finished his picture, those very months of steady work, rigorously revised, had raised his ideal higher, so that though the actual picture pretty well corresponded with his first conception, it was still far removed from his later standard. The expression of the woman’s face seemed especially inadequate, and as great actresses do not sit as models, and the artist has to imagine emotional expression, he felt again, despite his Romanticism, that he had missed the subtleties of reality. But every genus of art has to sacrifice something, and sending-in day was drawing swiftly nigh, and he had to lay down his brushes at last, and through his frame-maker despatch the canvas to Burlington House, and await with what composure he could the verdict that should bring him the recognition he had struggled for during such long tedious years. Now that the absorbing task was over, he had time to think of its reward, to dwell on the thought of recognition, of Fame, the one thing on earth that still loomed before him, enshrouded in vague, misty splendors. In a world of illusions, this was the solid happiness it might yet be his to grasp.

This last illusion was not destined to be dissipated yet awhile. He was sitting at the breakfast-table when he received a blue card inviting him to take back his picture. Burning with revolt and despair, he had to strive to appear calm, what time Rosina was unfolding a tale of woe concerning the maid-of-all-work, whom she had detected throwing away half-burned coals into the dust-hole. That, she reiterated monotonously, explained the mysteriously rapid disappearance of the coals--over a ton since quarter-day. An investigation of the dust-hole had revealed a veritable coal-mine. It was one of the most curious characteristics of Rosina that, with all her hardness, she flinched mentally before her servants, pouring out her grievances against them when they were out of ear-shot, so that her husband suffered vicariously for their sins of omission or commission. Usually he listened to her silently with the courteous deference he would have shown a guest, never provoked to an angry retort save by her absurd objections to his models. He had abandoned as hopeless the effort to unite their souls. But to-day he had no option but to cap her tragic narrative by telling her of his disappointment. The news excited her not to sympathy with his aspersed art, but to reproachful alarm for his pecuniary future.

This was the last straw. He might have stood out against the Academy, exhibiting elsewhere, and gradually building up an outside reputation; but the pecuniary independence to enable him to do this, which had been the main motive of his marriage, was the very thing that he now saw he must abandon. In his secret paroxysms of resentment--more against himself than against her--it became increasingly plain to him that he could not live on her money; that were intolerable to his reawakened manhood. He must make a financial success on his own account; he must become independent of her at any cost to Art. His entire preconception of his future had broken down, his marriage a failure from the financial point of view as from every other. Instead of having emancipated himself from the necessity of a monetary success, he had made life impossible without it. Well, he would compromise; he would recoil to leap the better; he would do what the public wanted, and then, having secured its attention, he would do what _he_ wanted.

He went to the Academy and to the Grosvenor Gallery, he studied the most popular pictures of his day, and in a couple of large canvases--one domestic, the other Biblical--set himself to outdo them in anecdotage and obviousness of technique.

In a passion of irony he half parodied his own picture of “The Merman’s Bride” in an idyllic interior called “Motherhood,” representing a mother holding up a little girl, who in her turn nursed a doll. Rosina sat for this to save expense, her own little girl being now weaned. The other picture was a “Vashti,” and for the repudiated queen did Rosina pose likewise, and with unwonted interest in her husband’s work.

Both pictures were cleverly painted, for Matthew Strang strove to atone for his lack of interest in his subjects by painful impeccability of technique, and to Rosina’s joy both won acceptance from the Hanging Committee, though at the eleventh hour--on the Saturday night before Varnishing Day--husband and wife were alike disappointed to receive an intimation that, through lack of space, only the smaller--“Motherhood”--could be hung.

Despite all his contempt for his picture and for the Academy, it was a tingling sensation to move amid the crowd of artists on Varnishing Day, and to see some whose serious faces he remembered noting on the platform on that memorable “Gold Medal Night” pause before his picture in admiration of the vigorous brush-work. This was a sign of success he was destined to experience in far greater measure the following year, but the keenness of the thrill could never be matched again.

And when “Motherhood” was mentioned in the papers, and in the early days of the Exhibition he watched fashionably clad ladies gather in front of it to commend the “sweetly pretty” child and its touching foreshadowing of maternity, Matthew Strang found himself insensibly beginning to partake in the general admiration; and with that strain of weakness which London had exposed in him from the first, he was tickled by the praise of these pretty women with their rustle of silks and their atmosphere of scent and culture, and his American birth subtly lent added spice to his sensation, in the thought of conquering with his rude home-born genius these votaries of an elegant civilization. He was quite annoyed when he heard of Morrison’s _mot_, that the doll was hit off to the life, but the other two figures were wooden. But it was not till “Motherhood” sold for two hundred pounds that the process of corruption really began to set in.

The buyer--a provincial cotton-spinner in town for his holiday--wished to sit for his portrait. The painter did not like to ask him to the whitewashed studio. He told Rosina they must move to a better neighborhood. The economical Rosina would not consent to quit a quarter where rates and provisions were low, and where she had by this time acquired several cronies equally martyred by their maids-of-all-work, so ultimately he took a larger studio in a more fashionable district, going to his work every day, like a clerk to his office, relieved from his wife’s overpowering proximity, and from her personal vision of his models coming and going, though her morbid suspicion was always ready to flare up. Thus the estrangement had begun. People sent him cards, not knowing he was married; after some embarrassed refusals he weakly accepted, without explanation, an invitation to dinner--unable to decline it gracefully, and knowing Rosina unsuited to the company--and his reticence made subsequent explanation more and more difficult. After a still greater success in the next Academy, with an only less conventional picture, he was caught in a fashionable whirl of work and social engagements, finding commission after commission thrust upon him, driven to hasty production of imposing compositions to preserve his place in the rapidly recurrent Academy and other Exhibitions, and always postponing the time when he would start upon the real artistic work of his life, when he should have accumulated enough money to give him a couple of years of freedom for independent Art, for that fearless expression of his own individuality which alone makes Art, which alone adds aught to the world’s treasure of Beauty by contributing a new individual vision of the Beautiful, and which, so far from being demanded by the paying public, must be a revelation of unknown riches.

A plethora of portrait commissions was not conducive to personal Art; people were much more clamorous for the likeness than in the days of Sir Joshua before photography had been invented, and every artist’s best portraits were always those unpaid, unchallenged portraits of his parents and friends--unflattered, yet touched with the higher beauty of truth. And portraits stood in the way of more complex work, though they got one a cheap reputation as a stylist. But there was a great run on Matthew Strang for portraits; almost as much as on one of his fellow-sufferers for marbles. The public would scarcely have anything else, and the voice of the public is the voice of the purse.

By fits and snatches he made attempts to express himself, but he never had time to find out what “himself” was. Sometimes, in a reversion to one of his earlier manners, he thought he wanted to express sensation, to transfer to the spectator of his landscape the sensation the original had given him, and from his country visits he would come back with studies of strange blue moonlight effects on cliffs, or weird dark seas, destined never to be worked up. He began a realistic picture of a winter view from Primrose Hill, with brownish trees in the foreground and gray in the background, and a white misty townlet to the left; but, fluctuating again, he abandoned it for an attempt to do the lyric of the brush, to express, as in balanced metres, harmonies of tree and sky and water, and this, again, was thrown aside for the picture of “Ideal Womanhood,” which, under the influence of a beautiful woman’s rebuke, he had felt was the real “himself” it behooved him to express. But the beautiful woman’s passage across his horizon had been momentary, and so even this piece of imaginative art had been finished hurriedly under the pressure of other work. And thus the years flew by like months, with incredible velocity. He could not escape from the net-work of engagements he had helped to weave, nor did he always desire to. There was a circumlapping consolation about the applause of the public, though it did not warm him. He found a bitter satisfaction, as of revenge, in the smiles of society dames, though he did not court them. He took no pleasure in the personal paragraphs and the notices of his work, though he knew they were necessary to his prices, and though he had no more liking for the severe estimates of the few who would have none of him. The breach with his wife widened imperceptibly, half involuntarily, though he was passively glad when she was not with him to complicate his life with her bourgeois ways, with her vulgar outlook.

He was driven to a more pretentious studio, which had sometimes to be the scene of responsive hospitalities, and which raised his prices. He fell into a semi-bachelor life. Late evening parties, early morning rides in the Park, visits for pleasure or portrait-painting or decoration to country houses (where his early familiarity with rod and gun gave him a valuable air of autochthonic aristocracy), excursions to Goodwood, to Henley, sketching tours, all tended to separate him from his wife, till at last an almost complete separation had grown up, so gradually that, except for her spasms of jealousy, Rosina seemed almost to have become reconciled to it in view of the popular success, the inflow of money, and the eternal economy of Camden Town, and instead of resenting his absence, to have come to welcoming his presence. When, on rare gala occasions, he took her out, the places she loved were those which no fashionable foot ever trod; and as the couple wandered--an obscure matrimonial molecule among the holiday masses--he was not sorry that his juvenile idea of fame as a blazoning _vade mecum_ was only one of the many illusions of youth. And so none of the scented chattering crowd that gathered on Show Sunday before his pictures or his refreshments had any inkling of the more legitimate _ménage_ in the less fashionable quarter. He absolved his occasional qualms of conscience by lavishing his earnings on her, which she hoarded--though he knew it not--partly from instinct, partly from a superstitious dread of a catastrophe when his hand should fail or her shares fall to zero. Too late he comprehended the hardness in money matters that had been at the root of her resentment against the defalcating Frenchman, and it was to spare her feelings, as well as to preserve peace, that he said never a word to her about the great sums with which he gladdened the Nova-Scotian household.

Not that Rosina knew much of his other affairs. In truth, she knew very little of her husband’s life, nor by how vast a sweep it circumscribed her own. She knew he had to be away from her a very great deal, that he had to stay in the country to paint great people; she was vaguely aware that the necessities of his profession made a wide sociality profitable. She had been once or twice to peep at his studio, horrified by the grandeur, and only consoled by the demonstration that its cost was repaid in the prices, like the luxurious fittings of the shops in the Holloway Road. But her imagination lacked the materials to construct a vision of the whirlpool which had sucked him away from her; her reading was limited to a weekly newspaper in which his name seldom appeared. And he, in his mental isolation from her, found scant self-reproach for his silence; reserve seemed more natural than communicativeness. She could never know the doings of his soul, his thoughts were not her thoughts, he had given up the attempt at communion, the effort to teach her to know his real self; why should he be less reticent concerning his outward movements, his superficial self? He was aloof from her spiritually; beside this, his material separation from her was insignificant. The children--a girl of seven and a boy of nearly four--were no bonds of union. The elder, christened Clara, after Rosina’s aunt, was sharp and lively enough, but given to passionate sulking; the younger--called after his grandfather, David--was a lymphatic, colorless youngster, sickly and rather slow-witted, with something of Billy’s pathos in his large gray eyes. Their father had tried hard to love them, as he had tried to love their mother, and had taken a certain proprietary interest in their infantile graces, and in the engaging ways of early childhood, but the claims of his Art left them in the mother’s hands, and the older they grew the less he grew to feel them his. Neither Clara nor David had as yet displayed any scintilla of artistic instinct. When he went home he usually had something for them in his pocket, as he would have had for the children of an acquaintance, but they gave him no parental thrill.