Of Human Bondage
Philip was present at the time, and Miss Chalice said to him:
“Why don’t you paint me too? You’ll be able to learn a lot by watching
Mr. Lawson.”
It was one of Miss Chalice’s delicacies that she always addressed her
lovers by their surnames.
“I should like it awfully if Lawson wouldn’t mind.”
“I don’t care a damn,” said Lawson.
It was the first time that Philip set about a portrait, and he began
with trepidation but also with pride. He sat by Lawson and painted as
he saw him paint. He profited by the example and by the advice which
both Lawson and Miss Chalice freely gave him. At last Lawson finished
and invited Clutton in to criticise. Clutton had only just come back to
Paris. From Provence he had drifted down to Spain, eager to see
Velasquez at Madrid, and thence he had gone to Toledo. He stayed there
three months, and he was returned with a name new to the young men: he
had wonderful things to say of a painter called El Greco, who it
appeared could only be studied in Toledo.
“Oh yes, I know about him,” said Lawson, “he’s the old master whose
distinction it is that he painted as badly as the moderns.”
Clutton, more taciturn than ever, did not answer, but he looked at
Lawson with a sardonic air.
“Are you going to show us the stuff you’ve brought back from Spain?”
asked Philip.
“I didn’t paint in Spain, I was too busy.”
“What did you do then?”
“I thought things out. I believe I’m through with the Impressionists;
I’ve got an idea they’ll seem very thin and superficial in a few years.
I want to make a clean sweep of everything I’ve learnt and start fresh.
When I came back I destroyed everything I’d painted. I’ve got nothing
in my studio now but an easel, my paints, and some clean canvases.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve only got an inkling of what I want.”
He spoke slowly, in a curious manner, as though he were straining to
hear something which was only just audible. There seemed to be a
mysterious force in him which he himself did not understand, but which
was struggling obscurely to find an outlet. His strength impressed you.
Lawson dreaded the criticism he asked for and had discounted the blame
he thought he might get by affecting a contempt for any opinion of
Clutton’s; but Philip knew there was nothing which would give him more
pleasure than Clutton’s praise. Clutton looked at the portrait for some
time in silence, then glanced at Philip’s picture, which was standing
on an easel.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Oh, I had a shot at a portrait too.”
“The sedulous ape,” he murmured.
He turned away again to Lawson’s canvas. Philip reddened but did not
speak.
“Well, what d’you think of it?” asked Lawson at length.
“The modelling’s jolly good,” said Clutton. “And I think it’s very well
drawn.”
“D’you think the values are all right?”
“Quite.”
Lawson smiled with delight. He shook himself in his clothes like a wet
dog.
“I say, I’m jolly glad you like it.”
“I don’t. I don’t think it’s of the smallest importance.”
Lawson’s face fell, and he stared at Clutton with astonishment: he had
no notion what he meant, Clutton had no gift of expression in words,
and he spoke as though it were an effort. What he had to say was
confused, halting, and verbose; but Philip knew the words which served
as the text of his rambling discourse. Clutton, who never read, had
heard them first from Cronshaw; and though they had made small
impression, they had remained in his memory; and lately, emerging on a
sudden, had acquired the character of a revelation: a good painter had
two chief objects to paint, namely, man and the intention of his soul.
The Impressionists had been occupied with other problems, they had
painted man admirably, but they had troubled themselves as little as
the English portrait painters of the eighteenth century with the
intention of his soul.
“But when you try to get that you become literary,” said Lawson,
interrupting. “Let me paint the man like Manet, and the intention of
his soul can go to the devil.”
“That would be all very well if you could beat Manet at his own game,
but you can’t get anywhere near him. You can’t feed yourself on the day
before yesterday, it’s ground which has been swept dry. You must go
back. It’s when I saw the Grecos that I felt one could get something
more out of portraits than we knew before.”
“It’s just going back to Ruskin,” cried Lawson.
“No—you see, he went for morality: I don’t care a damn for morality:
teaching doesn’t come in, ethics and all that, but passion and emotion.
The greatest portrait painters have painted both, man and the intention
of his soul; Rembrandt and El Greco; it’s only the second-raters who’ve
only painted man. A lily of the valley would be lovely even if it
didn’t smell, but it’s more lovely because it has perfume. That
picture”—he pointed to Lawson’s portrait—“well, the drawing’s all right
and so’s the modelling all right, but just conventional; it ought to be
drawn and modelled so that you know the girl’s a lousy slut.
Correctness is all very well: El Greco made his people eight feet high
because he wanted to express something he couldn’t get any other way.”
“Damn El Greco,” said Lawson, “what’s the good of jawing about a man
when we haven’t a chance of seeing any of his work?”
Clutton shrugged his shoulders, smoked a cigarette in silence, and went
away. Philip and Lawson looked at one another.
“There’s something in what he says,” said Philip.
Lawson stared ill-temperedly at his picture.
“How the devil is one to get the intention of the soul except by
painting exactly what one sees?”
About this time Philip made a new friend. On Monday morning models
assembled at the school in order that one might be chosen for the week,
and one day a young man was taken who was plainly not a model by
profession. Philip’s attention was attracted by the manner in which he
held himself: when he got on to the stand he stood firmly on both feet,
square, with clenched hands, and with his head defiantly thrown
forward; the attitude emphasised his fine figure; there was no fat on
him, and his muscles stood out as though they were of iron. His head,
close-cropped, was well-shaped, and he wore a short beard; he had
large, dark eyes and heavy eyebrows. He held the pose hour after hour
without appearance of fatigue. There was in his mien a mixture of shame
and of determination. His air of passionate energy excited Philip’s
romantic imagination, and when, the sitting ended, he saw him in his
clothes, it seemed to him that he wore them as though he were a king in
rags. He was uncommunicative, but in a day or two Mrs. Otter told
Philip that the model was a Spaniard and that he had never sat before.
“I suppose he was starving,” said Philip.
“Have you noticed his clothes? They’re quite neat and decent, aren’t
they?”
It chanced that Potter, one of the Americans who worked at Amitrano’s,
was going to Italy for a couple of months, and offered his studio to
Philip. Philip was pleased. He was growing a little impatient of
Lawson’s peremptory advice and wanted to be by himself. At the end of
the week he went up to the model and on the pretence that his drawing
was not finished asked whether he would come and sit to him one day.
“I’m not a model,” the Spaniard answered. “I have other things to do
next week.”
“Come and have luncheon with me now, and we’ll talk about it,” said
Philip, and as the other hesitated, he added with a smile: “It won’t
hurt you to lunch with me.”
With a shrug of the shoulders the model consented, and they went off to
a cremerie. The Spaniard spoke broken French, fluent but difficult to
follow, and Philip managed to get on well enough with him. He found out
that he was a writer. He had come to Paris to write novels and kept
himself meanwhile by all the expedients possible to a penniless man; he
gave lessons, he did any translations he could get hold of, chiefly
business documents, and at last had been driven to make money by his
fine figure. Sitting was well paid, and what he had earned during the
last week was enough to keep him for two more; he told Philip, amazed,
that he could live easily on two francs a day; but it filled him with
shame that he was obliged to show his body for money, and he looked
upon sitting as a degradation which only hunger could excuse. Philip
explained that he did not want him to sit for the figure, but only for
the head; he wished to do a portrait of him which he might send to the
next Salon.
“But why should you want to paint me?” asked the Spaniard.
Philip answered that the head interested him, he thought he could do a
good portrait.
“I can’t afford the time. I grudge every minute that I have to rob from
my writing.”
“But it would only be in the afternoon. I work at the school in the
morning. After all, it’s better to sit to me than to do translations of
legal documents.”
There were legends in the Latin quarter of a time when students of
different countries lived together intimately, but this was long since
passed, and now the various nations were almost as much separated as in
an Oriental city. At Julian’s and at the Beaux Arts a French student
was looked upon with disfavour by his fellow-countrymen when he
consorted with foreigners, and it was difficult for an Englishman to
know more than quite superficially any native inhabitants of the city
in which he dwelt. Indeed, many of the students after living in Paris
for five years knew no more French than served them in shops and lived
as English a life as though they were working in South Kensington.
Philip, with his passion for the romantic, welcomed the opportunity to
get in touch with a Spaniard; he used all his persuasiveness to
overcome the man’s reluctance.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said the Spaniard at last. “I’ll sit to
you, but not for money, for my own pleasure.”
Philip expostulated, but the other was firm, and at length they
arranged that he should come on the following Monday at one o’clock. He
gave Philip a card on which was printed his name: Miguel Ajuria.
Miguel sat regularly, and though he refused to accept payment he
borrowed fifty francs from Philip every now and then: it was a little
more expensive than if Philip had paid for the sittings in the usual
way; but gave the Spaniard a satisfactory feeling that he was not
earning his living in a degrading manner. His nationality made Philip
regard him as a representative of romance, and he asked him about
Seville and Granada, Velasquez and Calderon. But Miguel had no patience
with the grandeur of his country. For him, as for so many of his
compatriots, France was the only country for a man of intelligence and
Paris the centre of the world.
“Spain is dead,” he cried. “It has no writers, it has no art, it has
nothing.”
Little by little, with the exuberant rhetoric of his race, he revealed
his ambitions. He was writing a novel which he hoped would make his
name. He was under the influence of Zola, and he had set his scene in
Paris. He told Philip the story at length. To Philip it seemed crude
and stupid; the naive obscenity—c’est la vie, mon cher, c’est la vie,
he cried—the naive obscenity served only to emphasise the
conventionality of the anecdote. He had written for two years, amid
incredible hardships, denying himself all the pleasures of life which
had attracted him to Paris, fighting with starvation for art’s sake,
determined that nothing should hinder his great achievement. The effort
was heroic.
“But why don’t you write about Spain?” cried Philip. “It would be so
much more interesting. You know the life.”
“But Paris is the only place worth writing about. Paris is life.”
One day he brought part of the manuscript, and in his bad French,