A Modern Lover — Volume 1 Chapter 7

London: Tinsley Brothers, 1 June 1883, pages 101-125, 4,376 words

CHAPTER VII.

LEWIS SEYMOUR’S EARLY LIFE.

Behind his mother’s death, Lewis’ early life extended like a wide, grey cloud. In the hurry and trouble of London life he had forgotten the past, but as he leaned back in the large ease of a first class carriage, he complacently amused himself by picking out some portions of the obliterated picture. In ’forty three his father, whom he just remembered, had been appointed dispensary doctor, in the little town of        — . He had been elected in the face of much opposition, for an inkling of his gravity and sternness had got wind, and the inhabitants of — disliked above all things an unsociable doctor. The women worked heaven and earth against him; but his splendid testimonials for hospital service carried the day against his rival’s reputation for dancing and croquet playing.

On his arrival at — , Mr. Seymour took a house, built a laboratory, and declined an invitation to a dance.

This curious behaviour excited much comment, and as the days went by, the good people of — came to the conclusion that Mr. Seymour in no way belied the character that had preceded him. He was an excellent doctor, but he did not care for society. He neither drank nor gambled, but lived, as a wag said, buried in a lot of saucepans. In other words, Mr. Seymour was a chemist, and for his favourite pursuit he neglected everything except his patients. The townspeople used to say when the thick smoke issuing from the chimney of his laboratory attracted their notice, that Seymour was burning away hundreds of pounds in his crucibles. But what he spent or saved was problematic. He took no one into his confidence; he lived in himself, avoiding as much as possible the garrulous society of the place. He paid his visits, took his fees, and shirked dancing and dinner parties as much as possible.

This continued for years, until one day the smoke ceased to issue from the tall chimney, and then the doctor manifested a desire to become more cordial.

The society of        — hailed this conversion with delight, and the matrons soon discovered that Mr. Seymour was on the look out for a wife. The young girls made faces when their mammas spoke of him, he was far too serious for their tastes, but they were overruled by their elders.

For two months every one was on the tip toe of expectation, and it was then perceived that the doctor’s choice had fallen on Miss Oyler, the daughter of a rich corn merchant.

May Oyler was a soft, fair girl, with a receding chin. She liked her father’s clerk far better than the doctor, and when it was found out that Mr. Seymour had spent several thousands in chemicals, and that it would take more than half her fortune to pay off these debts, she hoped ardently that this would suffice to break off the engagement. But Mr. Seymour’s practice was large, for notwithstanding his unsociable disposition, his undoubted abilities had enabled him to maintain the position of fashionable doctor; and Mr. Oyler was ready to consent to anything, provided Mr. Seymour promised to give up chemistry.

This was agreed upon, and May Oyler became Mrs. Seymour.

For a year Mr. Seymour tried to do his duty, tried to be affectionate to his wife, tried to bring his nature down to hers; for a year he went with her into society, and let her receive the friends she liked. So determined was he to keep his promise, that she might have easily weaned him from his vice; but unfortunately her nature was so tepid, so incapable of an effort, that to escape from the horrible ennui of her company he soon began to pay fugitive visits to his laboratory.

Mrs. Seymour cried meekly in secret, and went to church to pray, and that was all she did or could do.

Lewis was the only child born of this ill-sorted match. He was his mother’s darling, but his beautiful blue eyes had in them a silly look, which horrified the father. The mother’s dullness seemed to have fallen on the son, and Mr. Seymour shut himself up more than ever in his studies. What Mr. Seymour’s studies were no one ever knew exactly.

Dr. Brown, who was the only person who could boast of much intimacy with Mr. Seymour, said that he believed in the future of electricity, and was making experiments with that view.

"A very able man indeed, but something of a dreamer,” as Doctor Brown would say. Had he finished his remarks here he would have been saved much regret, but, unfortunately, on being pressed for details, he added that Mr. Seymour had declared electricity to be the modern God that would revolutionise the world. Everybody was shocked. A suspicion of atheism was all that was wanted, and imperceptibly Mr. Seymour’s practice slipped away from him.

Writs came down, but Mr. Seymour paid no attention, he continued to work harder than ever in his laboratory, and the smoke poured more lustily than ever out of the tall chimney. Some said that he was on the eve of a successful experiment; and they were not wrong; for on the day the bailiffs came to seize, he was found dead; the jury returned a verdict of accidental death from an overdose of chloral, but it was generally supposed he had committed suicide.

Mrs. Seymour’s whole fortune on her husband’s death consisted in an interest to the extent of two hundred pounds a year in her father's corn business, which, the old man being now dead, was now carried on by her brother.

On this modest competence she determined, not only to live, but if possible to save money. She took a very small house at the end of the town, and devoted the rest of her wretched life to her son’s welfare.

Mother and son lived quite alone, seeing nobody but a few relations. Mr. Seymour’s suspected atheistical opinions and manner of life had alienated them during his lifetime from the society of the place, and now she felt herself incapable of making new friends; those of her youth were dispersed.

Poverty also lent its hand to complete Mrs. Seymour’s isolation, but she did not complain, she accepted life as it came.

Lewis grew up by her side a shy, timid lad. She taught him how to read and write, and what she remembered of French. But she did not succeed very well, and the silent tears would often stream down her cheeks on to the books. Her only consolation, and it was a supreme one, was that her son seemed to be content to be with her.

He shrunk from the rough play of boys, and the only acquaintances he made were women. He had quite a circle of admirers, whom he used to visit, with whom he used to spend long dreamy afternoons, full of infinite tenderness, feminine sympathies and affinities, which he knew so well how to savour and appreciate, but which husbands, and even lovers, pass their lives in ignoring, or misunderstanding. And to sit and look into women’s eyes as they talked, or to lie down alone in a quiet woodland place, was all he seemed to care for. His intelligence dawned slowly; and it was not till he was over fifteen that his mind began to brighten, and he asked to be allowed to attend a school. There he dawdled away his time learning something vaguely in a desultory way, evincing no taste for anything except dreaming. Sometimes he would take a volume of verse to the woods, and strive to read it, but it soon fell from his hand, and he would lie for hours like a plant, conscious of nothing but the air he breathed. These endless languors continued until, instinctively he began to draw, on the margin of the paper, the landscape before him. This last fancy developed itself daily, and the whole of his seventeenth year was spent brush in hand. Little bits of green underwood, pleasant places where the shadows were soft and soothing, were what he loved best to depict, and as he used to wander about, painting whatever caught his fancy, he soon became a conspicuous person in the place.

He made the acquaintance of Mrs. — , who belonged to one of the first of the county families, through a sketch he was making near her house. He looked so poetical, with his long curls hanging round his neck, that she made her husband go and speak to him, and the conversation ended in his being asked to lunch.

After this success he was made quite a lion of; he was asked out everywhere, and everybody was of one opinion, that he would be a great artist. Mrs. Seymour was not invited, nor did she want to follow Lewis into society: she was content to sit at home and wait for him to return, and tell her of his successes, and these last years were about the happiest of her life.

But as Lewis got on with his painting, he began to think of going to London to study, and he was advised to do so by everybody he knew. Mrs. Seymour was prepared to sell up her home, and sacrifice herself for her son’s welfare, but her health, which had for some time been in a declining state, so suddenly got worse, that the project had to be given over. Then followed a year full of wearying anxiety, of ominous hours, of whispered words. Mrs. Seymour died slowly; one month she appeared to be recovering, the next she seemed to be sinking, and the next she changed neither for the better nor the worse; she died, as she had lived, feebly.

Lewis watched and waited, fretted, grew wearied, and was sorrowful. The house, always dark, grew more oppressive as the livid shadows of death crept through the rooms; and the neighbours came and went, and pitied the young man.

But at length the last night arrived. Lewis was sitting in the little drawing-room, trying to read as he waited for the doctor. The lamp burnt on the table, and the clock ticked on the chimney-piece, and the hours grew darker and more silent. Feverish with apprehension, he threw open the window, and stood looking into the moonlit street. Then he heard a rapping at the door, and the nurse entered, and her grave face told him what had happened.

If all had gone well, his mother’s death would have put him in possession of a very nice little fortune. The house and furniture would have fetched at least two hundred pounds, and after paying all the funeral expenses, there would still be a balance of one hundred and fifty pounds. With this to use as ready money, and two hundred a year at the back, he would have been able to study art in all the countries in Europe, if it so pleased him. But his life’s current had to run through many sudden shoals and eddies before it swelled into a wide stream of prosperity.

The first of the shipwrecking reefs he had to pass was his uncle’s failure. This occurred almost immediately after Mrs. Seymour’s death. Mr. Oyler had not only failed, but his failure was a fraudulent one, and he had fled the country.

The two hundred a year to which Lewis was entitled out of the business was utterly lost and he found himself obliged to face the world with something like three hundred and fifty pounds, instead of a comfortable competence.

This was a terrible reverse to receive at the very start; but Lewis’s temperament was an enthusiastic one, and knowing nothing, he feared nothing, and he thought London would fall at the first sound of his clarion.

His pictures had been admired by Mr. So-and-so and so-and-so; he had been received by Mrs. — , and the Essex Telegraph had said he was a promising young artist. So, like many a one before him, he thought that because he had succeeded in the country he would succeed in London. He had done lots of drawings at the training school at — , any one of which he was sure would get him admitted into the Academy in London, and on his three hundred and fifty pounds he could live until the golden ducats came tumbling in.

Having made up his mind that this was the best course for him to adopt, one fine morning he took a last look at his native place. His eyes were full of tears as he bade his friends goodbye; they had been very good to him, particularly Mr. — , who had helped him to arrange his affairs, and given him much good advice.

He was full of confidence; he had two suits of clothes and nearly a dozen shirts in his portmanteau; his three hundred and fifty pounds were safely deposited in a bank, and the master of the training school had given him a letter of introduction to a Mr. Thompson, a very clever fellow, the head of a new school who styled themselves "the moderns.”

The drawing master had not been able to tell him anything about "the moderns,” and very little about Thompson; he had not seen him for years. He had only heard that he was at the head of this movement, which was supposed to be very much opposed to the classics.

All the way up to London Lewis tried to fill up this scanty outline; he wondered what Thompson was like, and he tried vainly to imagine what the painting of "the moderns" was like. Of art he had seen nothing but the plaster casts in the training school, the pictures in the country houses he visited, and some photographs of a new school, which, in a kind of early Italian form, gave expression to much ephemeral languor. This Lewis thought the beau idéal of all that life could desire, and he wondered if that was what Thompson did; it seemed to him impossible to desire more.

On arriving in London he drove to the hotel he had been recommended; and next morning, at an early hour, went off to see Thompson.

He had never been in a studio in his life; and he was full of apprehensions and surmises. After a great deal of hunting through Chelsea he found the address. He was received very kindly, but his first feeling on looking round was one of complete bewilderment.

He had expected to see graceful nymphs languishing on green banks, either nude or in classical draperies, and, instead, he was regaled

with views of housemaids, in print dresses, leaning out of windows, or bar girls serving drinks to beery looking clerks. In fact, the walls were covered, not with the softness of ancient, but with the crudities of modern life.

He turned his eyes to the right and left dumbfounded. At the end of the room there was a picture of two acrobats in their pink fleshings; Lewis looked at it in amazement. The strong odour of life it exhaled was too much for him. So extraordinary did the pictures appear to him, that at first he felt as if he were the victim of some monstrous joke. Yet, on examining it, he recognised exquisite bits of drawing and colour, but the form of expression was so strange.

"I see you are astonished,” said Thompson, laughing; "you know we don’t care for the modernised versions of the early Italians, so popular now-a-days, but we will talk about that later on; you will get to understand what we mean by and by; whether you’ll agree with us or no is another question; for the present, let me see your work.”

Lewis unrolled a quantity of drawings he had done from the antique in the training school, and he tried to read in Thompson’s face what he thought of them. They were fairly well done, and showed dexterity of hand.

When Thompson had gone carefully through them, he asked to see Lewis’s original sketches; with these he was less satisfied, but he knew it would be vain to expect much individuality from one who had been taught in a country training school.

"So you have come up to London to learn to be an artist,” said Thompson, eyeing Lewis severely.

Thompson was a stout, short man; he wore a red beard, and spoke with a strong Scotch accent.

"Yes, I wanted to enter the academy, but you don’t care for Greek art,” replied Lewis, who began to feel very miserable; he had expected that Thompson would go into raptures over his drawings, and he had only looked at them as he would at a child’s copy book.

“I didn’t say I didn’t like Greek art, but I make a difference between the pseudo Greek and Italian of the nineteenth century, to that of Pericles and Innocent III; but you will hear all about that soon enough. At present you want to get into the academy; well, on the whole, I think it is the best thing for you to do, and I think one of these drawings will get you in.”

He then asked Lewis some questions as to his money arrangements, and appeared to think three hundred and fifty pounds was plenty to start in life with. He told him where he could get a room for seven shillings a week, and where he would be able to dine for tenpence, and explained how in that way he would be able to live for more than three years on the money he had, and by that time, if he had anything in him, he would be able to get along.

Although Thompson loathed the Academy system of training, he could not think of anything better that Lewis could do than to join the schools. He was a country boy, alone in London, and it would take him some time to learn even what people in the London art world were thinking about.

A year in the schools would do him no harm. He would meet there some of the moderns, whose counsels would counteract those of the medievalists, and Lewis would be able to choose between the two.

Under the general title of "the moderns" were united all the artists, painters, musicians and writers, who believed that the arts are the issue of the manners and customs of the day, and change with those manners according to a general law. Of such elements the group was really composed, but the title was most commonly applied to the painters, of whom Thompson was the leader.

Wearied of the art that only tried to echo the beauty of the Apollo and the Venus de Medici, and loathing that which distorted the early Italian formula to make it available as a means of expressing the sexless hysteria of our age, they longed for a new art racy of the nineteenth century. They declared that a new aestheticism was to be discovered; that the materials were everywhere around them; that only the form had to be found.

This was what they sought; the new formula which would enable them to render modern life in all its poignancy and fulness. They maintained that the world has seen four perfectly distinct artistic methods. The first on the list is the Egyptian; the second, the Greek; the third, the Italian; and the fourth, the Japanese; and they declared that the absolute originality of the Japanese in art could only be accounted for by the fact, that they had been fortunate enough never to have seen a Greek statue. It was a favourite subject of joke amongst them to imagine what would have been the result if a ship-load of the Elgin marbles had been cast on the shores of Yeso, in the year of our Lord —

Thompson was the leader of this little band. He fortified them in their faith, that nature is not limited to these four formulas, and he encouraged them to seek for a fifth in the seething mass of human life, one as comprehensive of our civilisation as the method of the Egyptians was of theirs. He forced them to love art for its own sake, and prevented them from prostituting their talents to the pay of the cheap dealers, who demand the vile and the worthless. It was Thompson who served them as a sort of centre; he rallied them, theorised their confused aspirations, and gave to many, if not the clue to the problem, at least, strength to believe that they were following the light of the truth.

In a month from the time Lewis arrived in London, he entered the academy as a student, and every Saturday he brought his week’s work to Thompson’s studio.

He lived in a room in Chelsea, which cost him seven shillings a week; he spent sixpence on his breakfast, which his landlady supplied, and with a shilling he dined comfortably in one of the cheap eating houses where the joint is fourpence.

Living in this way, the necessaries of life would cost him about forty-five pounds a year; adding twenty-five pounds to that for clothes, paints, brushes, and occasional expenses, the total would come to seventy pounds; consequently, he would be able to work in perfect security and calm for the next five years, and by that time he hoped to sell his pictures.

As Thompson expected, it took some time before Lewis fell in with the ideas of the new artistic movement. For a long time he could not understand why the academical drawings, where every muscle is beautifully modelled, belonged to no species of art; for a long time he could not understand why Frazer painted his sunset effects in a deep violet tint, and why Cassell painted black hair blue; yet, before the end of the year, he was one of the most ardent disciples of the new faith.

An ardent disciple in theory, but only faintly in practice, for he was never able to shake himself free of the conventional prettiness of things.

One evening a week they met in Thompson’s room, and those were the hours they all looked forward to; there they smoked and argued and encouraged each other.

He had fallen in with a clique of strong-minded fellows; they soon grew to like him, and it was owing to their influence that for over a year he struggled against his natural proclivities, and worked steadily. He made rapid progress, he learned to draw intelligently and correctly, and if it had not been for one of those million chances of which our lives are composed, he might have lived to have conquered his passions, and to have done good work for art’s own sake.

Thompson would not allow him to paint pictures, but made him stick to his drawing; but on Sundays he used to go into the country to sketch, and one day, happening to do a bit of river scenery which pleased Thompson, he thought he would have it framed, and present it to his friend.

But the picture dealer and frame maker to whom he went was struck with the sketch, and offered him fifteen shillings for it. At first Lewis refused to part with it; but thinking that he could do another better, he ended by taking the money.

Up to that time his expenses had been so regulated that every penny that passed through his hands had had a purpose, and now there came fifteen shillings which he could not account for, that is to say, he could spend it as the fancy prompted him.

He jingled the money as he went along, and, remembering that his neck-tie was very soiled, he entered a shop and bought a new one. As he walked towards the coffee-house where he dined habitually he passed a cheap café, and he could not resist the temptation of dining there; he had a cup of coffee and a cigar after dinner. These little luxuries, coming after so much steady privation, were very soothing and flesh satisfying, and the fifteen shillings enabled him during the whole week to make little additions to his dinner, which he was not able afterwards to give up, and to continue them necessitated purloining hours from regular study to do drawings for the frame maker.

This succeeded very well for a time. At prices varying from five to fifteen shillings, Mr. — consented to buy his sketches, and Lewis found that an extra ten shillings a week made his life much more comfortable. But this slight change in his way of living involved many delicate complexities. Firstly, having a few shillings in his pockets made him care less for his lonely chamber, and more for bar rooms; secondly, he was enabled to go out with students whom he had before avoided because he had no money to spend, and these causes, acting together, quickly produced a change in him, and it was not long before he began to shirk his daily work at the academy.

Thompson shook him up and got him back for a week or so, but he soon slipped away again. This hesitation between duty and pleasure continued for over three months, and then came the old story, the old stumbling block, over which, curiously enough, he had not till now tripped, at least to any appreciable extent. Even now it was only a half-hearted affair; there was very little of the Sardanapalus about it; it was not a passionate love for which he sacrificed everything; it merely led him to spend a little more money on gloves, to dine on three instead of two shillings, to idle a little more than before, and in six months all his money was gone. Then he lived on credit and his friends; occasionally he sold trifles, which staved off the evil days, but before six months were over he was pawning his clothes, and would have starved long ago, had it not been for old Bendish.