Gilbert Cannan

“ I am very lonely because I am a Jew and people do not understand me, or rather they think they understand me because I am a Jew. They think all Jews are the same. It is very rarely that I feel I am accepted as a man with thoughts, feelings, tears, laughter, tastes, bowels, senses like any other man.”
“I know,” said Logan sympathetically.
“How can you know? You have only to live in a world that is ready-made for you. I have to make mine as I go, step by step.”
“That isn’t because you are a Jew, but because you are an artist. It is the same for all of us.” ”

“ If an artist is not a free man, then he is not an artist. And I say that if the artist is outlawed, then he must use any and every means to get out of the world what it denies him. One must live.”
“That’s true,” said Mendel.
“You may take it from me that there is less room in the world now for artists than ever there was. In the old days you chose your patron and he provided for you, as the Pope provided for Michael Angelo, and you devoted your art to whatever your patron stood for, spiritual power if he happened to be a pope, secular power if he happened to be a duke or a king. ”

“ In the glitter and the excitement, the brilliance, the colour, the women with their painted faces, the white marble-topped tables, the mirrors along the walls, the blue wreathing tobacco-smoke, Calthrop’s personality was magnified and concentrated as in a theatre. The café without him was Denmark without the Prince, and Mendel found the hours before he came or the evenings when he did not come almost insupportable. Yet it was not the man’s success or his fame or his notoriety that fascinated the boy, whose instinct went straight to the immense vitality which was the cause of all. ”

“ He felt, as he told Logan afterwards, like a tree putting out its leaves in the spring.
And yet he could not tell how this miracle was accomplished. No words could explain it—abstraction, composition, design, none of these words helped at all. It was not so much the doing of the thing, the art of the painter, as the setting out of the woman on the canvas without reference to anything in heaven or earth, or any idea, or any emotion or desire. It was enough that she was a woman, not especially beautiful, not particularly remarkable. ”

“ You are always more dead than alive, and I cannot bear to see you with her. I cannot bear even to think of you with her.”
“For God’s sake, don’t talk like that!” muttered Logan, quickening his pace to keep up, for Mendel was flying along.
“You must either give her up or me,” said Mendel.
“Don’t say that!” pleaded Logan; “don’t say that! I can’t get on without you. I don’t see how I can get on without you. All the happiness I have ever had has come through you. Every hope I have is centred in you. If you go, life will become nothing but work, work, work, with nobody to understand. Nobody. ”

“ It was incomprehensible to him that Logan should take Oliver seriously. She was the woman for a holiday, for a wild outburst of lawlessness, not for the morning and the evening and the day between.
“Oh, do cheer up, Kühler! You are like a death’s-head at a feast.”
He looked at her with a piercing glance which silenced her. No: she was no holiday woman. She was the woman for a drab, drudging life, with no other colour or joy in it than her own animal warmth. She was like Rosa, made for just such a dreary, simple, devoted fool as Issy. What could she do with a strong passion? ”

“ They all seem to understand everything. Life is solved: there are no more problems, and the rarest flower of all is the human heart. Yet the violets and the apple-blossoms fade and the birds sing no more: the spring passes and the summer is infernally hot and stale, and winter comes at last. So it is with love and women. Nothing endures but art, and that they are physically incapable of understanding. My God! Don’t I know it? A picture of mine means no more to Oliver than my boot does—rather less, because my boot is warmed with the warmth of my body. ”

“ While Mendel had been wrestling and struggling, he had been put away in cotton-wool, every difficulty that had cropped up had been met, every deep desire had found its outlet in convention. And now that he had set out to be an artist, here was this Jew with years of hard work behind him, and such a familiarity with his medium that he could do more or less as he liked without being held up by shyness or awkwardness. And it was the same in life. Mendel was abashed by nothing, was ashamed of nothing. Life had many faces. ”

“ If it were Weldon or Kessler I should say you were lying.”
“I do not lie,” replied Mendel with some heat. “It may have been wrong, but it was good, and I was happier after it. I think I should have gone mad without it, for everything had disappeared—everything—everything; and without painting you do not understand how terrible and empty life is to me. I have nothing, you see. I am poor, and my father and mother will always be poor. Their life is hard and beastly, but they do not complain, and I should not complain if I did not have this other thing that I must do.” ”

“ I am only astonished that they are happy with such little things.”
“It is nothing,” said Golda. “They are not truly happy; they are only hiding away from themselves.”
“But I am finding myself,” cried Mendel. “I shall no more paint fishes and onions. I shall paint only what I feel, and it will be beautiful. I am so clever I can paint anything I choose.”
“Go to your work now,” said Golda. “You can boast as much as you please when the King has sent for you and told you you are the greatest artist in England. Go to your work.” ”

“ I will swing up to it as high as ever you like, but I must swing back again. Happiness is not life, love is not life, any more than misery is life. If I stay in happiness I die as surely as if I stay in misery. I must be like a pendulum. I must swing to and fro or the clock will stop. . . . I can’t make it clear to you, but it is so. What matters is that the clock should go. Jews understand, but they forget that they are the pendulum and they do not live at all. Jews are wonderful people. They know that what matters is the impulse of the soul. ”

“ You mustn’t talk like that, Mendel. Please don’t think I don’t love you because I don’t want you to talk like that. It is the first thing to come into your mind, but with me it is almost the last thing. I want love to be very, very beautiful before it comes to me. I want love to be as beautiful to me as that picture of Cézanne’s is to you. ”

“ In the quiet, ordered, patriarchal world of the Jews a rare nature might arise, but in that extraordinary confusion nothing rare could survive. Beauty could never compete on equal terms with women’s legs in tights and electric sky-signs; it could never produce an impression on minds obsessed and crammed to overflowing with the multitudinous excitements of the metropolis.
Mendel was convinced that Logan was right, that beauty must emerge to establish authority, and he thought of himself as engaged in a combat with a huge, terrible monster. ”

“ It must be because you love me that you can feel it when no one else can. Even to Logan it is only like a superior poster.”
How adorable he was in this mood of simplicity and humility! She could relax her vigilance, and sway unreservedly to his mood and give him all that he required of her, her clearness, her sensitive purity.
“You are like no other woman in the world to me,” he went on. “You fill me with the most wonderful joy, like a Cranach or a Dürer drawing. I can forget almost that you are a woman, so that it is a most wonderful surprise that you are one after all. ”

“ It is not my poverty that denies it to me, for if the poor Jews do not know a good thing, the rich Jews certainly do not, for the rich Jews are rubbish who stroke the Christians with one hand and rob them with the other. It is something that she knows almost without knowing it herself.”
Logan smiled.
“I am not a fool about her,” cried Mendel. “She is not particularly beautiful to me. There is only one line in her face that I think beautiful, from the cheek-bone to the jaw. I am not a fool about her, but I had almost given the Christian world up in despair. ”

“ There was no spirit of revolt in him. He could shed some of the outward forms of his religion, as to Golda’s great distress he did, but against its spirit he could not rebel. That he carried with him everywhere: the bare stubborn faith in man, ground down by life and living in sorrow all his days. Happy he was not, nor did he expect to be so. He might be happy one day, but he would be miserable the next. Life in him was not greatly concerned with either, but only to have both happiness and misery in full measure. ”

“ It was an enormous relief to Mendel when Logan went. His enthusiasm was too exhausting, and it was maddening to have him talking of [Pg 226] success and the triumph of art and the wars of the spirit when life had apparently reached up and extinguished the light of art altogether. For a brief moment, for a day or two, it had almost seemed to him that life and art were one, that everything was solved and simple, that he would henceforth only have to paint and pictures would flow from his brush as easily as song from a bird. This illusion had survived even the blow of Morrison’s departure. ”

“ Jews think of everything else and forget the impulse of the soul. But I know that when I swing from happiness to unhappiness, from good to bad, from light to dark, then a force comes into my soul and it can move up to art, and beyond art, into that place where it can be free. . . . Don’t, please, misunderstand me.” He addressed himself frankly to Morrison, who dropped her head a little lower. “In love I can no more be free than I can in misery. I will swing as high on one side as I will on the other, and then I can be free.” ”

“ She darted a mischievous glance at Mendel, who started under it as though he had been stung. He was horrified at the depth of his dislike of her, and he remembered with disgust her full, coarse bosom exposed as she lay in her calculated swoon. . . . How good it had been while she was gone with that fool Thompson, who suited her so perfectly, that chattering ape, with his talk of Van Gogh and Gauguin and “abstract art,” who stood now coveting her with shining eyes and fatuously smiling lips.
“I’m not good enough for some people,” she said. “When I come into the room there is silence.” ”

“ His eyes were glaring at her with a passion that she took for sensuality, because it came out of the dinginess of his soul. And he was stiffening into an iron column of egoism, on which she knew she could make no impression. She knew, too, that her presence was aggravating the stiffening process. . . . She felt caught, trapped, and she wanted to get away. Love must be free—free as the wind on the heath, as the blossom of the wild cherry. Love must have its blossoming time, and he was demanding the full heat of the summer. ”

“ England has become one vast music-hall, with everybody with any talent or brains scrambling to top the bill. It runs through everything—art, politics, the press, literature, social reform, women’s suffrage, local government; and the people who top the bill can’t be dislodged, just like the poor old crocks on the halls, who come on and give the same show they were giving twenty years ago, and get applause instead of rotten eggs because the British public is so rotten with sentiment and so stupid that it can’t tell when a man has lost his talent. ”

“ Art lay beyond that other world. He felt sure of that. It lay beyond Mr. Sivwright. If he stayed among his own people he would stop dead; for he knew now that it was true that the Jews stopped dead.
And then to his horror he stopped. For no reason at all his skill, his enthusiasm, his eagerness left him. He forced himself to paint, transferred innumerable idiotic faces from photographs to cigar-box lids, made his mother neglect her work to sit to him, bribed Lotte to be his model, but hated and loathed everything that he did. ”

“ An artist was to him a great artist, a book that pleased him was a great book, and his constant lament was over the dearth of great men in public life. It gave him the keenest delight to see Logan, unkempt, wild-haired, shaggy, violent and brusque, enter his daintily furnished drawing-room, and his eyes passed eagerly to Oliver, looking just as she ought to have done, the mistress of a Bohemian. ”

“ Mendel disliked her, though he tried hard to persuade himself that she was charming. He was baffled by the solemnity with which Logan was taking her, for she seemed to him the type made for occasional solace and not for companionship. Exploring her with his mind and instinct, she seemed to him soft and pulpy, not unlike an orange, and if she and Logan were to set up a common life, then he would be like a pip indeed. . . . How could he explain to her the nature of genius? Can you explain the night to an insect that lives but an hour in the morning? ”

“ I no longer believe in the Detmold or in Calthrop or in any of the things I reverenced as a student. I prefer the Academy, for it does not pretend to be advanced, and is honest though asleep. I am no longer a student. I am an artist. You will always be an art student, and so I say good-bye to you, as one says good-bye to friends on a station-platform. The train moves and all their affectionate memories and longings cannot stop it. ”

“ He saw the woman he wanted and took her and made her his property, and the woman could not but acquiesce, as Oliver had done. In a dozen different ways she acknowledged Logan’s lordship, even in her deliberate efforts to exasperate him. Their relationship seemed to Mendel simple and excellent, and he envied them. How easy his life would become if he could do the same! What freedom there would be in having a woman to throw in her lot with his! It would settle all his difficulties, absolve him from his dependence on his family, and deliver him from the attentions of unworthy women. ”

“ He was a dying man. But Mendel was alive, never more alive than now, in face of the shadow of death, and he would not think the thoughts of a dying man unless they could be shaped in the likeness of life. He gathered together all his forces, summoned up everything that urged him towards life and towards art, and of his own strong living will plunged after Logan, no longer in obedience to Logan’s frozen purpose, but as a friend giving to his friend the meed that was due to him. ”

“ Mendel touched them with his fingers, lovingly caressed the fleshy petals of a tulip. Mrs. Froitzheim went over to her husband and whispered to him, who said:—
“Yes. Yes. It is true. He responds to beauty like a flower to the sun.”
In the centre of the studio was a large picture nearly finished of three children and a rocking-horse, cleverly and realistically painted. Mendel looked at it enviously, with a sinking in the pit of his stomach, partly because he could not like it, and partly because he felt how impossible it would be for him to cover so vast a canvas. ”

“ He admired, too, Logan’s insistence on an absolute separation of his art and his life with Oliver, who was never for one moment admitted to his mind. Rather to his dismay, but at the same time with a wild rush of [Pg 261] almost lyrical impulse, Mendel, finding himself with no other emotion than that of being in love, set himself to paint love. He worked with an amazing ease, painting one picture one day and covering it with another the next, feeling elatedly convinced that everything he did was beautiful, yet knowing within himself that he was in a bad way. ”

“ And now here was Mitchell babbling of his love for Morrison. When Mendel wanted to talk of pictures and art and the old painters who had worked simply without reference to success, Mitchell kept dragging him back to Morrison, her simplicity, her extraordinary childlike innocence, her love of beauty, her generous trustfulness, her queer sudden impulses.
“What has such a girl as that to do with art or with artists?” said Mendel furiously. “An artist wants women as he wants his food, when he has time for them.” ”

“ Mendel sat up and bristled. It was to him half shocking, half enviable, that a man, and an artist, should be able to laugh at himself.
“If you’ll give me free drinks for a month,” said Logan to the elderly barmaid, “I’ll paint your portrait. Are you married? . . . No? I’ll paint you such a beautiful portrait that it will get you a husband inside a week.”
“I’m not on the marrying lay,” said the barmaid.
“Terrible thing, this revolt against marriage,” replied Logan, “and bad luck on us artists. I’m always getting babies left on my doorstep.” ”

“ And they want art always, always to remind them of that—how they have been, are, or will be in love, as they call it. And what they call being in love is nothing but a filthy lecherous longing, which is a thousand miles beneath love, and twenty thousand miles beneath art, which is so rare, so noble, so beautiful a mystery that only those whom God has chosen can understand it at all ”

“ MR. TILNEY TYSOE LOGAN with Oliver was more startling and exhilarating than before. He was filled with a ferocious energy, and his programme was distended with it.
He said to Mendel:—
“She’s an inspiration. I have found what I was seeking. You have given me the inspiration of art. Through you I shall reach the heights of the spirit. She has given me the inspiration of life, and through her I shall plumb the very depths of humanity. She is marvellous. All the exasperation of modern life is in her, all the impatient brooding on the threshold of new marvels. ”

“ With the spirit of this manifesto Mendel was in agreement, though he could make but little of its letter. He refused to agree to it because so much talk seemed to him unnecessary.
“If we can say what we mean to say in paint, then we need not talk. If we cannot say it in paint, then we have no right to talk.”
“You’d soon bring the world to a standstill,” said Logan, “if you limited talk to the people who have a right to it. It is just those people who never open their mouths. I think it is criminal of them, just out of shyness and disgust, to give the buffoons and knaves an open field.” ”