第17章

"You are indeed.You're quite off the hinge.What's the meaning of this new fad?" And he tossed me, with visible irreverence, a drawing in which I happened to have depicted both my elegant models.I asked if he didn't think it good, and he replied that it struck him as execrable, given the sort of thing I had always represented myself to him as wishing to arrive at; but I let that pass--I was so anxious to see exactly what he meant.The two figures in the picture looked colossal, but I supposed this was not what he meant, inasmuch as, for aught he knew to the contrary, Imight have been trying for some such effect.I maintained that Iwas working exactly in the same way as when he last had done me the honour to tell me I might do something some day."Well, there's a screw loose somewhere," he answered; "wait a bit and I'll discover it." I depended upon him to do so: where else was the fresh eye?

But he produced at last nothing more luminous than "I don't know--Idon't like your types." This was lame for a critic who had never consented to discuss with me anything but the question of execution, the direction of strokes and the mystery of values.

"In the drawings you've been looking at I think my types are very handsome.""Oh they won't do!"

"I've been working with new models."

"I see you have.THEY won't do."

"Are you very sure of that?"

"Absolutely--they're stupid."

"You mean I am--for I ought to get round that.""You can't--with such people.Who are they?"I told him, so far as was necessary, and he concluded heartlessly:

"Ce sont des gens qu'il faut mettre a la porte.""You've never seen them; they're awfully good"--I flew to their defence.

"Not seen them? Why all this recent work of yours drops to pieces with them.It's all I want to see of them.""No one else has said anything against it--the Cheapside people are pleased.""Every one else is an ass, and the Cheapside people the biggest asses of all.Come, don't pretend at this time of day to have pretty illusions about the public, especially about publishers and editors.It's not for SUCH animals you work--it's for those who know, coloro che sanno; so keep straight for me if you can't keep straight for yourself.There was a certain sort of thing you used to try for--and a very good thing it was.But this twaddle isn't in it." When I talked with Hawley later about "Rutland Ramsay" and its possible successors he declared that I must get back into my boat again or I should go to the bottom.His voice in short was the voice of warning.

I noted the warning, but I didn't turn my friends out of doors.

They bored me a good deal; but the very fact that they bored me admonished me not to sacrifice them--if there was anything to be done with them--simply to irritation.As I look back at this phase they seem to me to have pervaded my life not a little.I have a vision of them as most of the time in my studio, seated against the wall on an old velvet bench to be out of the way, and resembling the while a pair of patient courtiers in a royal antechamber.I'm convinced that during the coldest weeks of the winter they held their ground because it saved them fire.Their newness was losing its gloss, and it was impossible not to feel them objects of charity.Whenever Miss Churm arrived they went away, and after Iwas fairly launched in "Rutland Ramsay" Miss Churm arrived pretty often.They managed to express to me tacitly that they supposed Iwanted her for the low life of the book, and I let them suppose it, since they had attempted to study the work--it was lying about the studio--without discovering that it dealt only with the highest circles.They had dipped into the most brilliant of our novelists without deciphering many passages.I still took an hour from them, now and again, in spite of Jack Hawley's warning: it would be time enough to dismiss them, if dismissal should be necessary, when the rigour of the season was over.Hawley had made their acquaintance--he had met them at my fireside--and thought them a ridiculous pair.Learning that he was a painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but he looked at them across the big room, as if they were miles away: they were a compendium of everything he most objected to in the social system of his country.Such people as that, all convention and patent-leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no business in a studio.A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair of feather-beds?