Of Human Bondage
restaurant to go to a play and Philip was sitting alone, Clutton came
in and ordered dinner. They began to talk, and finding Clutton more
loquacious and less sardonic than usual, Philip determined to take
advantage of his good humour.
“I say I wish you’d come and look at my picture,” he said. “I’d like to
know what you think of it.”
“No, I won’t do that.”
“Why not?” asked Philip, reddening.
The request was one which they all made of one another, and no one ever
thought of refusing. Clutton shrugged his shoulders.
“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise. Besides,
what’s the good of criticism? What does it matter if your picture is
good or bad?”
“It matters to me.”
“No. The only reason that one paints is that one can’t help it. It’s a
function like any of the other functions of the body, only
comparatively few people have got it. One paints for oneself: otherwise
one would commit suicide. Just think of it, you spend God knows how
long trying to get something on to canvas, putting the sweat of your
soul into it, and what is the result? Ten to one it will be refused at
the Salon; if it’s accepted, people glance at it for ten seconds as
they pass; if you’re lucky some ignorant fool will buy it and put it on
his walls and look at it as little as he looks at his dining-room
table. Criticism has nothing to do with the artist. It judges
objectively, but the objective doesn’t concern the artist.”
Clutton put his hands over his eyes so that he might concentrate his
mind on what he wanted to say.
“The artist gets a peculiar sensation from something he sees, and is
impelled to express it and, he doesn’t know why, he can only express
his feeling by lines and colours. It’s like a musician; he’ll read a
line or two, and a certain combination of notes presents itself to him:
he doesn’t know why such and such words call forth in him such and such
notes; they just do. And I’ll tell you another reason why criticism is
meaningless: a great painter forces the world to see nature as he sees
it; but in the next generation another painter sees the world in
another way, and then the public judges him not by himself but by his
predecessor. So the Barbizon people taught our fathers to look at trees
in a certain manner, and when Monet came along and painted differently,
people said: But trees aren’t like that. It never struck them that
trees are exactly how a painter chooses to see them. We paint from
within outwards—if we force our vision on the world it calls us great
painters; if we don’t it ignores us; but we are the same. We don’t
attach any meaning to greatness or to smallness. What happens to our
work afterwards is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it
while we were doing it.”
There was a pause while Clutton with voracious appetite devoured the
food that was set before him. Philip, smoking a cheap cigar, observed
him closely. The ruggedness of the head, which looked as though it were
carved from a stone refractory to the sculptor’s chisel, the rough mane
of dark hair, the great nose, and the massive bones of the jaw,
suggested a man of strength; and yet Philip wondered whether perhaps
the mask concealed a strange weakness. Clutton’s refusal to show his
work might be sheer vanity: he could not bear the thought of anyone’s
criticism, and he would not expose himself to the chance of a refusal
from the Salon; he wanted to be received as a master and would not risk
comparisons with other work which might force him to diminish his own
opinion of himself. During the eighteen months Philip had known him
Clutton had grown more harsh and bitter; though he would not come out
into the open and compete with his fellows, he was indignant with the
facile success of those who did. He had no patience with Lawson, and
the pair were no longer on the intimate terms upon which they had been
when Philip first knew them.
“Lawson’s all right,” he said contemptuously, “he’ll go back to
England, become a fashionable portrait painter, earn ten thousand a
year and be an A. R. A. before he’s forty. Portraits done by hand for
the nobility and gentry!”
Philip, too, looked into the future, and he saw Clutton in twenty
years, bitter, lonely, savage, and unknown; still in Paris, for the
life there had got into his bones, ruling a small cenacle with a savage
tongue, at war with himself and the world, producing little in his
increasing passion for a perfection he could not reach; and perhaps
sinking at last into drunkenness. Of late Philip had been captivated by
an idea that since one had only one life it was important to make a
success of it, but he did not count success by the acquiring of money
or the achieving of fame; he did not quite know yet what he meant by
it, perhaps variety of experience and the making the most of his
abilities. It was plain anyway that the life which Clutton seemed
destined to was failure. Its only justification would be the painting
of imperishable masterpieces. He recollected Cronshaw’s whimsical
metaphor of the Persian carpet; he had thought of it often; but
Cronshaw with his faun-like humour had refused to make his meaning
clear: he repeated that it had none unless one discovered it for
oneself. It was this desire to make a success of life which was at the
bottom of Philip’s uncertainty about continuing his artistic career.
But Clutton began to talk again.
“D’you remember my telling you about that chap I met in Brittany? I saw
him the other day here. He’s just off to Tahiti. He was broke to the
world. He was a brasseur d’affaires, a stockbroker I suppose you call
it in English; and he had a wife and family, and he was earning a large
income. He chucked it all to become a painter. He just went off and
settled down in Brittany and began to paint. He hadn’t got any money
and did the next best thing to starving.”
“And what about his wife and family?” asked Philip.
“Oh, he dropped them. He left them to starve on their own account.”
“It sounds a pretty low-down thing to do.”
“Oh, my dear fellow, if you want to be a gentleman you must give up
being an artist. They’ve got nothing to do with one another. You hear
of men painting pot-boilers to keep an aged mother—well, it shows
they’re excellent sons, but it’s no excuse for bad work. They’re only
tradesmen. An artist would let his mother go to the workhouse. There’s
a writer I know over here who told me that his wife died in childbirth.
He was in love with her and he was mad with grief, but as he sat at the
bedside watching her die he found himself making mental notes of how
she looked and what she said and the things he was feeling.
Gentlemanly, wasn’t it?”
“But is your friend a good painter?” asked Philip.
“No, not yet, he paints just like Pissarro. He hasn’t found himself,
but he’s got a sense of colour and a sense of decoration. But that
isn’t the question. It’s the feeling, and that he’s got. He’s behaved
like a perfect cad to his wife and children, he’s always behaving like
a perfect cad; the way he treats the people who’ve helped him—and
sometimes he’s been saved from starvation merely by the kindness of his
friends—is simply beastly. He just happens to be a great artist.”
Philip pondered over the man who was willing to sacrifice everything,
comfort, home, money, love, honour, duty, for the sake of getting on to
canvas with paint the emotion which the world gave him. It was
magnificent, and yet his courage failed him.
Thinking of Cronshaw recalled to him the fact that he had not seen him
for a week, and so, when Clutton left him, he wandered along to the
cafe in which he was certain to find the writer. During the first few
months of his stay in Paris Philip had accepted as gospel all that
Cronshaw said, but Philip had a practical outlook and he grew impatient
with the theories which resulted in no action. Cronshaw’s slim bundle
of poetry did not seem a substantial result for a life which was
sordid. Philip could not wrench out of his nature the instincts of the
middle-class from which he came; and the penury, the hack work which
Cronshaw did to keep body and soul together, the monotony of existence
between the slovenly attic and the cafe table, jarred with his
respectability. Cronshaw was astute enough to know that the young man
disapproved of him, and he attacked his philistinism with an irony
which was sometimes playful but often very keen.
“You’re a tradesman,” he told Philip, “you want to invest life in
consols so that it shall bring you in a safe three per cent. I’m a
spendthrift, I run through my capital. I shall spend my last penny with
my last heartbeat.”
The metaphor irritated Philip, because it assumed for the speaker a
romantic attitude and cast a slur upon the position which Philip
instinctively felt had more to say for it than he could think of at the
moment.
But this evening Philip, undecided, wanted to talk about himself.
Fortunately it was late already and Cronshaw’s pile of saucers on the
table, each indicating a drink, suggested that he was prepared to take
an independent view of things in general.
“I wonder if you’d give me some advice,” said Philip suddenly.
“You won’t take it, will you?”
Philip shrugged his shoulders impatiently.
“I don’t believe I shall ever do much good as a painter. I don’t see
any use in being second-rate. I’m thinking of chucking it.”
“Why shouldn’t you?”
Philip hesitated for an instant.
“I suppose I like the life.”
A change came over Cronshaw’s placid, round face. The corners of the
mouth were suddenly depressed, the eyes sunk dully in their orbits; he
seemed to become strangely bowed and old.
“This?” he cried, looking round the cafe in which they sat. His voice
really trembled a little.
“If you can get out of it, do while there’s time.”
Philip stared at him with astonishment, but the sight of emotion always
made him feel shy, and he dropped his eyes. He knew that he was looking
upon the tragedy of failure. There was silence. Philip thought that
Cronshaw was looking upon his own life; and perhaps he considered his
youth with its bright hopes and the disappointments which wore out the
radiancy; the wretched monotony of pleasure, and the black future.
Philip’s eyes rested on the little pile of saucers, and he knew that
Cronshaw’s were on them too.
LI
Two months passed.
It seemed to Philip, brooding over these matters, that in the true
painters, writers, musicians, there was a power which drove them to
such complete absorption in their work as to make it inevitable for
them to subordinate life to art. Succumbing to an influence they never
realised, they were merely dupes of the instinct that possessed them,
and life slipped through their fingers unlived. But he had a feeling
that life was to be lived rather than portrayed, and he wanted to
search out the various experiences of it and wring from each moment all
the emotion that it offered. He made up his mind at length to take a
certain step and abide by the result, and, having made up his mind, he
determined to take the step at once. Luckily enough the next morning
was one of Foinet’s days, and he resolved to ask him point-blank
whether it was worth his while to go on with the study of art. He had
never forgotten the master’s brutal advice to Fanny Price. It had been
sound. Philip could never get Fanny entirely out of his head. The
studio seemed strange without her, and now and then the gesture of one
of the women working there or the tone of a voice would give him a
sudden start, reminding him of her: her presence was more noticable now
she was dead than it had ever been during her life; and he often
dreamed of her at night, waking with a cry of terror. It was horrible
to think of all the suffering she must have endured.