A Modern Lover — Volume 2 Chapter 5

London: Tinsley Brothers, 1 June 1883, pages 76-95, 3,501 words

CHAPTER V.

WORK.

A hundred dreams of success had accumulated in Lewis’s mind during his long idleness, and his fingers had grown to itch for brushes and paint. He could think of nothing else, he could talk of nothing else.

While the workmen were making the necessary alterations he strove to kill the time by buying frames, canvases, and looking for models, so that he might not waste a moment before setting to work.

As he hunted them up in their poor lodgings, many thoughts came to him of his past life, and often as he mounted a rickety staircase, he paused at the landing, fearing to meet Gwynnie Lloyd, dreading the retrospective examination of conscience that such a meeting would entail.

He had glided into his present life feebly and inertly. At first it had shocked him to allow Mrs. Bentham to pay for his studio, but it was easy to imagine that one day he would be in a position to return her the money.

Of his genius he had no doubt. This year a picture of his had been hung in the academy; it was a small portrait of Mrs. Bentham, and one or two papers had made mention of it; this was quite sufficient to confirm him in his belief that he had nothing to do but paint pictures to become an academician. He had found a tall, thin girl, with magnificent red hair, and was certain of being able to do something wonderful with her. Her image, for days, never left him; he had determined to paint her against a crimson curtain, the copper-coloured hair on a poppy red would give a vivid idea of Salome. The idea enchanted him, and he fancied (forgetting that he was only doing in red what Reginault did in yellow) that his genius was above all things surpassingly original.

The studio was perfect; the model was perfect; the canvas, six feet by four, drew the charcoal towards it like a magnet; and as for the drapery, he had found a most extraordinary piece of crimson cloth, it positively screamed crimson.

Mrs. Bentham was at Claremont House, so there was nothing to distract his attention. He was quite cracked about his picture; he ordered the model to be there at eight o’clock precisely, and he worked till five with only an hour for lunch. He made a sketch of the head and one of the whole figure, and even thought of doing a life size cartoon. What he had learnt at the Beaux Arts enabled him to make sure of his drawing; all had been measured and plumbed, now he had only to paint the wonderful colour; and for days he strove to model the crimson tinted flesh up to the curtain. It was very difficult; but, on the whole, he was satisfied with his work, and longed to show it to some one, to discuss his intentions, to receive encouragement and advice.

He had now been out of London for a year and a half, and had lost sight of his artist friends. This was a great loss to him; for if there was one thing he needed more than another, it was sympathy. Being essentially an amateur, he required the plaudits and encouragements of eye-witnessing friends; he could not work instinctively in solitude, like the silkworm, which is the true type of the artist.

Thompson he had met once accidentally, but the bitter, epigrammatic Scotchman showed little disposition to renew the friendship of past years. Seeing, however, that Lewis took it to heart, Thompson promised to try to find time to look him up, and a few days after, he came, with his friend Harding, to see the Salome.

Thompson looked rather disgusted at the effeminate appearance the studio presented, but admitted that the picture was better than he had expected,

Harding declared himself delighted, and, lighting a cigarette, and lying down on a large divan under the window, attempted to read the moral character of the occupant, in the external appearance of his studio.

Between ourselves and our surroundings an analogy can always be traced; but in Lewis’s case this likeness was singularly marked. For between the febrile forms of beauty he strove to explain, in his pictures, and his own feminine face and figure, the general arrangement and character of the furniture, down to the patchouli scented handkerchief, that cast a sharp odour through the room, there was a logical sequence that could not fail to strike so keen an observer as Harding.

"So you think that I have begun very well," said Lewis, looking at Thompson questioningly.

"It isn’t bad," said the chief of the moderns; "but it is rather conventional.”

"Conventional!" returned Lewis, aghast; "where did you ever see a nude figure done in full light before a red curtain?”

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

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

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

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

The novelist professed to like the picture, and he discussed the question of dancing with Thompson, but he soon began to talk of Mrs. Bentham, whom he appeared to think of much more importance than the Salome, and he asked many questions about her. He seemed particularly anxious to know all about the sojourn in France.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking the painting too smooth, he set to work to re-do it; but in a couple of days had lost all the modelling. The pretty legs which had so pleased him now put him into such a rage that it was with difficulty he restrained himself from kicking the canvas through. In vain he tried different kinds of execution; he painted from nature broadly, and tried to finish a piece at a time. Then he made drawings, sent his model away, and tried to copy them, and could eat no dinner, thinking of his failures.

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

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

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

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

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

Howell had unfortunately blown his brains out in despair.

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

One day, as he saw a dream vanishing under his hands, he threw down his brushes, and in despair went to see Thompson, to seek for advice and encouragement.

Thompson was painting the portrait of a lady; she wore a large hat, and was placed against a light brown Venetian blind; Lewis looked at it with despair in his heart. There was nothing forced, nothing eccentric about it; it did not show any desire on the part of the painter to exaggerate; it had evidently come to him quite naturally, and it was obviously a new art, an art that was the outcome of the life and thought of to-day.

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

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

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

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

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

That night Lewis could not sleep, thinking of Thompson’s portrait, and wondering how he could do something like it. He was out of bed at eight, he worked till five, then rubbed out all he had done, and walked about the streets wearied. Day after day the same struggle was continued. He turned upon his thoughts, but he felt as if he were bound and could not get free. Thompson had struck him through with an artistic aspiration, and he writhed on it like an insect on a pin.

For two months this continued, till, in despair, remembering that, after all, what Thompson did found but little favour with the picture dealers, he set to work to produce work in his own style. But whether it was he had lost his hand, or whether it was that he knew more now than he used to, he could not say, but it appeared to him that he painted worse now than ever. Anyhow, he finished a head and a small picture, and invited the dealers to come and see them; some came, but none would buy. This was the culminating point of all, for it added to the misery of unachieved desire, the fear of not being able to succeed even in the humbler walks of art. Then, in despair, he again sought the consolation of the moderns. He frequented more than ever Thompson’s studio. There he met Frazer, who still continued to paint landscapes whose austere character and unconventional handling of pigment rendered them almost unsaleable.

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

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

Lewis met Stanley, and was very much struck by his picture of a racecourse. It showed the crowd outside the saddling paddock, with some racers walking down to the post, the principal horse’s head being cut in two by a long, white post, which divided the picture into equal halves; a little eccentric, no doubt, but, as Frazer said, a vigorous protest against the conventional forms of composition.

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

He grew to love art more and more; the hollow, empty look of his own work, when compared with the high aesthetic fervour of what he had seen at Thompson’s, drove him to distraction, and he racked his brain trying to think of what he should do. He neglected his drawing, as did Crossley, and sought for the sentiment of the effect; not satisfying himself, he tried to draw as Thompson did, by the character, and to get rid of the mechanical method he had learned at the Beaux Arts.

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

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

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

Not his good, but his bad, qualities saved him, and led him out of the labyrinth in which he had lost himself.

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

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

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

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

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

Her coming was a great relief, and plaintively he told her how he had tried and failed; how art had bitterly repulsed him from the doors, and at last, in a burst of hysterical passion, he threw himself into her arms and wept.

In all lives, even the humblest, there is always an hour which, like a picture or poem, stands out from the rest, because it is the hour which resumes the most completely the conflicting desires and emotions of which our lives are made. And this hour was Mrs. Bentham’s. This hour when the twilight was darkening, and the figures on the easels began to look like white spots, when her lover surrendered his dreams, and came to her as a child for comfort and consolation.

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