Israel Zangwill

“ 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. ”

“ When the flux of the garden-party had drifted her off in the wake of Gerard Brode, the handsome young Socialist, he had felt that he, too, might have become a Socialist or a ploughboy, or even an honest painter, under the inspiration of her enthusiastic eyes. He had thought of her for several months, almost as a creature of dream, so swift and shadowy had been her flitting across his horizon, and she had easily lent herself to that conception of Ideal Womanhood which the world had not yet destroyed, because the world had not created it. ”

“ Aspiring now to paint London, he wanders through the gray streets, as in his days of hunger, but now the grotesque figures no longer seem outside the realm of serious Art, or mere picturesque arrangements of line and color. To his purged vision, that still lacks humor, they touch the mysteries and the infinities, passing and disappearing like ghosts on a planet of dream: solitude has brought him a sense of the universal life from which they flow, and he fancies the function of Art should be to show the whole in every part, the universal through the particular. ”

“ It was his second defeat, his second farewell to Art, bitterer, crueller by a thousand-fold than the first, when he had sailed home again penniless, broken in soul and body. Then, at least, home was a tender recollection. Now—! And he had been so near the goal of happiness, the cup had been at his very lips. Never to be happy—never, never! The sudden shriek of the engine sounded sardonic. The train moved on, bearing Matthew Strang from all the sweetness and savor of life. In the great ocean of existence wherein men struggle for happiness he had gone down—like his father. ”

“ Under no other scheme of things could the soul enjoy the privilege of virtue. To have suffered, as he himself had done, by the institution of marriage, both as child and husband; to have been a victim to the general laws which safeguard human society; to have been cut in two by the flaming swords of the cherubim, which turn every way to keep the way of the Tree of Life—all this did not, he thought, give him the right to blaspheme existence. And the artist at least extracted a soul of good from all things evil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She bade him good-bye at last; she would not see him again for many months, unless he came to Paris.
“I always run over to do the Salon,” he answered, indifferently.
When he had seen her, stately and stiff, to her carriage, and his studio-door had shut him in again, he ripped up the canvas with his old sailor’s knife in a paroxysm of fury. His eye caught the silver regatta cup standing proudly upon the piano. He felt like dashing it down; then it occurred to him how fine and bitter a revenge it would be upon her and humanity at large to fill it with poison and drain it to the dregs. ”

“ Whether the Yankee compounded thus for the use of Matt’s dollars Matt never knew, but in his kinder thought of the cute peddler the boy came to think himself the debtor. For the dollars mounted, one on the head of another, and the heap rose higher and higher, day by day and week by week, till at last the magic three hundred began to loom in the eye of hope. Three hundred dollars! saved by the sweat of the brow and semi-starvation, and sanctified by the blood and tears of youth; sweet to count over and to dream over, and to pile up like a tower to scale the skies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Why would Miss Regan perversely obtrude the prose of life upon his consciousness? He would not answer her—he tried to drift again with the magic stream, but the spell was broken. He knew it was Eleanor’s music that made the pictures, and that the odors came from the flowers at Olive’s throat.
“He is painting Nor’s portrait,” she went on, indifferently.
He had to answer her now—in a stifled interrogative, masking a sudden sharp agony and foreboding.
“What, Herbert?”
“Yes; he asked her to give him some sittings. He hasn’t altogether become a critic, you see.” ”

“ That gilded unreality to which his Art would have gravitated, had he found happiness with the sentimental Eleanor in her atmosphere of fashion, will be replaced by the beauty that even when mystic is based on Truth. He needed no woman’s inspiration, nor the stimulus of cultured cliques. Alone he faces the realities of life and death without intervening veils of charming illusion, no longer craving to filter the honest sunlight through stained cathedral windows or to tarnish the simplicity of the grave with monumental angels. ”

“ Herbert laughed. “My stars, Matt!” he cried, gayly, “that’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make! Is Cornpepper’s whiskey so much better than mine?”
It was, perhaps, not so much the whiskey as the reaction after the long, respectful self-repression of the evening. But Rocks caught fire in his turn.
“Revolution!” he cried, scornfully. “Doing things literally by halves—there’s a revolution, there’s a revelation for you. The new art! If the modern young man can’t draw, color’s the thing; and if he’s got no sense of color, color is vulgar. ”

“ He was still of the down-trodden classes, of those whom fate, if not man, grinds down, whose lives slip by in a vain yearning for the sun, who see happiness as a phantasm that is only solid for others, and love as the mocking mirage of a beauty that is far away. He was angry—so unreasonably angry that the unreason seemed a reason for fresh anger with himself. And he was angry, not only with himself, but with Herbert, with the world, aye, with Eleanor Wyndwood and her idle, hare-brained visitors, reeking of the toilet-table, chattering of poems, pictures, and symphonies. ”

“ You have everything that makes life worth living: you have love—you have a wife whenever you choose to come; you have money, and heaps of it, all earned by the sweat of your own brow; you have fame—your name is in all the papers; you have fashionable folk courting and caressing you. I dare say some fine-scented lady fixed that rose so beautifully in your button-hole; I can smell her white fingers. It’s all roses and sunshine for you. But you take jolly good care to keep ’em to yourself.”
The imbittered words carried no sting to the painter’s breast. ”

“ No, Matt at least would have none of him. Life under his roof would be a discord of jarring memories. He would go back to his hut and live in the wood. He would shoot enough to live upon, and there, alone and self-sufficient and free as its denizens, he would pass his life painting and sketching. Or, if he wanted society, he would seek that of the Indian, the simple, noble Indian, and pitch his lot with his for a time or forever. Or perhaps Tommy would stay with him—Tommy who was deep without being wily, and restful without being dull. What a pity Billy was disabled ”

“ Each man had his equipage decorated after his own taste or whim, though he always began by leaving it entirely to the artist. One would order lemon-yellow underworks, with vermilion stripes and an olive-green body, for another the ideal of beauty lay in lake and russet-and-green, while the fancy of a third would turn lightly to Prussian blue and gold stripes; and Matt, devoid now of artistic interest and thus of artistic irritability, faithfully obeyed the behests of his employers, and filled the leafy streets with a riotous motley of perambulating color. ”

“ But the sun shone on the dusty litter and the mess and the lumber, and the lilac-bush blossomed beautifully, and over all was the joy of youth and Art and the gayety of the spring. Matthew Strang felt an ancient thrill pass through his sluggish veins. To be young and to paint—what happiness! His eyes moistened in sympathy with the scene. The models were redolent of Art—the very children breathed Art, the babes sucked it in. Art was a republic, and everybody was equal in it—the doughtiest professor and the meanest model, the richest amateur and the penurious youth starving himself to be there. ”

“ At last, as they are turning homeward, late in the afternoon, Matt stands still suddenly, rapt by the poetry of the scene, the shimmering pools, the stretch of brown sand, strewn with sea-weeds, the background of red head-lands, crowned with scattered yellow farms embosomed in sombre green spruces, and, brooding over all, the windless circle of the horizon, its cold blue veiled and warmed and softened by a palpitating, luminous, diaphanous haze of pale amethyst tinged with rose. He knows no word for what he sees; he only feels the beauty. ”

“ Matt was not angry any longer, but he was uncomfortable. He tried to whip up his sense of romance, to feel what he felt in reading love-poetry, to fancy that he was sitting with a pensive princess in a cedar grove under a crescent moon. But he could only feel that Priscilla was a real terrestrial person, and mendacious at that.
Priscilla’s lips sought his in a long kiss. “You are fond o’ me, Matt, aren’t you?” she murmured, coaxingly. ”

“ Suddenly, as his gaze rested with a suspicion of wistfulness on this doubly artistic interior, in which the pictures were only pleasant spots of color in a larger harmony, a harmony of rugs and flowers and tapestry and picturesque properties and bric-à-brac, there shot up in his mind an image of an ancient episode. He saw himself, a shy, homely figure, standing in despairing bitterness on the threshold of an elegant studio—though not so elegant nor so commodious as this—the studio of the brilliant cousin whose life had intersected his own so many years ago. ”

“ Though the expense of the trip had wellnigh eaten up his savings, his heart was as light as his pocket. He was going only to the States, but he felt that, in quitting his native soil, the voyage to London, the temple of Art, and to his uncle, its high-priest, had begun. The moon shone over the twinkling harbor like a great gold coin, and as the vessel spread its canvas wings and glided out of the confusion of shipping, Matt felt that its name was not the least happy omen in this auspicious moment. The ship was named The Enterprise. ”

“ Before Matt Strang bade farewell to the jail, the Frenchman broke off a ventriloquial performance to beseech him with tears in the name of the camaraderie of Art, and for the sake of their ancient affection, now that he was going forth into the free sunshine, to expostulate with that cruel creditor and plead for unhappy genius. The persecutor—Coble by name—would not listen to his own appeals; but if a brother-artist would speak for him, Coble’s better nature—and every man had a better nature—might be touched, and the skylark might soar freely again towards the blue empyrean. ”

“ From the glooms and trials of the daily routine in this prosaic home, with its faithful but narrow-souled mistress, who knew not what was passing in her husband’s mind, nor at what cost he had made her happy, and who would not even agree to live in some beautiful country spot which would have softened life for him—from this depressing household, with its unsprightly children, its cheerless pensioner, its querulous cripple resenting the very hand that fed him, he escaped to the little whitewashed studio to find in his Art oblivion of the burden of life. ”

“ And the rugged simplicity of his briny, horny-handed mates was equally restful after the garish brilliance of the young artists about town; after all, his heart was with homely folk, went out to sea-folk; he was his father’s son and the brother of all those who go down to the sea in ships and do business in the great waters. How like a child’s cackle Cornpepper’s epigrams sounded across the silence of the lonely deep! Under the hushed stars, touching the infinite spaces with awful beauty, all these feverish figures of the smoking-room showed like fretful midges. ”

“ The level of womanhood, if you like. You’ve loved a man.”
Eleanor’s face flushed. “That is the height of womanhood, Olive.”
“Oh yes—fine phrases! The height of womanhood!” She drew a comb fiercely through her hair. “To hang on a man’s lips, to feel a foolish sense of blankness when he isn’t there, and a great wave of joyful pain when he heaves in sight again. To kiss his every little note! To think of him and your trivial self as the centre of the universe, and to want the planets to spin for your joint happiness—oh!” ”