The Moon and Sixpence
I do not know what there was in the way he told me this that
extraordinarily suggested the violence of his desire. It was
disconcerting and rather horrible. His life was strangely divorced from
material things, and it was as though his body at times wreaked a
fearful revenge on his spirit. The satyr in him suddenly took
possession, and he was powerless in the grip of an instinct which had
all the strength of the primitive forces of nature. It was an obsession
so complete that there was no room in his soul for prudence or
gratitude.
“But why did you want to take her away with you?” I asked.
“I didn’t,” he answered, frowning. “When she said she was coming I was
nearly as surprised as Stroeve. I told her that when I’d had enough of
her she’d have to go, and she said she’d risk that.” He paused a
little. “She had a wonderful body, and I wanted to paint a nude. When
I’d finished my picture I took no more interest in her.”
“And she loved you with all her heart.”
He sprang to his feet and walked up and down the small room.
“I don’t want love. I haven’t time for it. It’s weakness. I am a man,
and sometimes I want a woman. When I’ve satisfied my passion I’m ready
for other things. I can’t overcome my desire, but I hate it; it
imprisons my spirit; I look forward to the time when I shall be free
from all desire and can give myself without hindrance to my work.
Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous
importance. They want to persuade us that it’s the whole of life. It’s
an insignificant part. I know lust. That’s normal and healthy. Love is
a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure; I have no patience
with their claim to be helpmates, partners, companions.”
I had never heard Strickland speak so much at one time. He spoke with a
passion of indignation. But neither here nor elsewhere do I pretend to
give his exact words; his vocabulary was small, and he had no gift for
framing sentences, so that one had to piece his meaning together out of
interjections, the expression of his face, gestures and hackneyed
phrases.
“You should have lived at a time when women were chattels and men the
masters of slaves,” I said.
“It just happens that I am a completely normal man.”
I could not help laughing at this remark, made in all seriousness; but
he went on, walking up and down the room like a caged beast, intent on
expressing what he felt, but found such difficulty in putting
coherently.
“When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your
soul. Because she’s weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing
less will satisfy her. She has a small mind, and she resents the
abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material
things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders
through the uttermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to
imprison it in the circle of her account-book. Do you remember my wife?
I saw Blanche little by little trying all her tricks. With infinite
patience she prepared to snare me and bind me. She wanted to bring me
down to her level; she cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be
hers. She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the
one thing I wanted: to leave me alone.”
I was silent for a while.
“What did you expect her to do when you left her?”
“She could have gone back to Stroeve,” he said irritably. “He was ready
to take her.”
“You’re inhuman,” I answered. “It’s as useless to talk to you about
these things as to describe colours to a man who was born blind.”
He stopped in front of my chair, and stood looking down at me with an
expression in which I read a contemptuous amazement.
“Do you really care a twopenny damn if Blanche Stroeve is alive or
dead?”
I thought over his question, for I wanted to answer it truthfully, at
all events to my soul.
“It may be a lack of sympathy in myself if it does not make any great
difference to me that she is dead. Life had a great deal to offer her.
I think it’s terrible that she should have been deprived of it in that
cruel way, and I am ashamed because I do not really care.”
“You have not the courage of your convictions. Life has no value.
Blanche Stroeve didn’t commit suicide because I left her, but because
she was a foolish and unbalanced woman. But we’ve talked about her
quite enough; she was an entirely unimportant person. Come, and I’ll
show you my pictures.”
He spoke as though I were a child that needed to be distracted. I was
sore, but not with him so much as with myself. I thought of the happy
life that pair had led in the cosy studio in Montmartre, Stroeve and
his wife, their simplicity, kindness, and hospitality; it seemed to me
cruel that it should have been broken to pieces by a ruthless chance;
but the cruellest thing of all was that in fact it made no great
difference. The world went on, and no one was a penny the worse for all
that wretchedness. I had an idea that Dirk, a man of greater emotional
reactions than depth of feeling, would soon forget; and Blanche’s life,
begun with who knows what bright hopes and what dreams, might just as
well have never been lived. It all seemed useless and inane.
Strickland had found his hat, and stood looking at me.
“Are you coming?”
“Why do you seek my acquaintance?” I asked him. “You know that I hate
and despise you.”
He chuckled good-humouredly.
“Your only quarrel with me really is that I don’t care a twopenny damn
what you think about me.”
I felt my cheeks grow red with sudden anger. It was impossible to make
him understand that one might be outraged by his callous selfishness. I
longed to pierce his armour of complete indifference. I knew also that
in the end there was truth in what he said. Unconsciously, perhaps, we
treasure the power we have over people by their regard for our opinion
of them, and we hate those upon whom we have no such influence. I
suppose it is the bitterest wound to human pride. But I would not let
him see that I was put out.
“Is it possible for any man to disregard others entirely?” I said,
though more to myself than to him. “You’re dependent on others for
everything in existence. It’s a preposterous attempt to try to live
only for yourself and by yourself. Sooner or later you’ll be ill and
tired and old, and then you’ll crawl back into the herd. Won’t you be
ashamed when you feel in your heart the desire for comfort and
sympathy? You’re trying an impossible thing. Sooner or later the human
being in you will yearn for the common bonds of humanity.”
“Come and look at my pictures.”
“Have you ever thought of death?”
“Why should I? It doesn’t matter.”
I stared at him. He stood before me, motionless, with a mocking smile
in his eyes; but for all that, for a moment I had an inkling of a
fiery, tortured spirit, aiming at something greater than could be
conceived by anything that was bound up with the flesh. I had a
fleeting glimpse of a pursuit of the ineffable. I looked at the man
before me in his shabby clothes, with his great nose and shining eyes,
his red beard and untidy hair; and I had a strange sensation that it
was only an envelope, and I was in the presence of a disembodied
spirit.
“Let us go and look at your pictures,” I said.
Chapter XLII
I did not know why Strickland had suddenly offered to show them to me.
I welcomed the opportunity. A man’s work reveals him. In social
intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to
accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences
from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from fleeting
expressions, which cross his face unknown to him. Sometimes people
carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course
they actually become the person they seem. But in his book or his
picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. His pretentiousness
will only expose his vacuity. The lathe painted to look like iron is
seen to be but a lathe. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a
commonplace mind. To the acute observer no one can produce the most
casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.
As I walked up the endless stairs of the house in which Strickland
lived, I confess that I was a little excited. It seemed to me that I
was on the threshold of a surprising adventure. I looked about the room
with curiosity. It was even smaller and more bare than I remembered it.
I wondered what those friends of mine would say who demanded vast
studios, and vowed they could not work unless all the conditions were
to their liking.
“You’d better stand there,” he said, pointing to a spot from which,
presumably, he fancied I could see to best advantage what he had to
show me.
“You don’t want me to talk, I suppose,” I said.
“No, blast you; I want you to hold your tongue.”
He placed a picture on the easel, and let me look at it for a minute or
two; then took it down and put another in its place. I think he showed
me about thirty canvases. It was the result of the six years during
which he had been painting. He had never sold a picture. The canvases
were of different sizes. The smaller were pictures of still-life and
the largest were landscapes. There were about half a dozen portraits.
“That is the lot,” he said at last.
I wish I could say that I recognised at once their beauty and their
great originality. Now that I have seen many of them again and the rest
are familiar to me in reproductions, I am astonished that at first
sight I was bitterly disappointed. I felt nothing of the peculiar
thrill which it is the property of art to give. The impression that
Strickland’s pictures gave me was disconcerting; and the fact remains,
always to reproach me, that I never even thought of buying any. I
missed a wonderful chance. Most of them have found their way into
museums, and the rest are the treasured possessions of wealthy
amateurs. I try to find excuses for myself. I think that my taste is
good, but I am conscious that it has no originality. I know very little
about painting, and I wander along trails that others have blazed for
me. At that time I had the greatest admiration for the impressionists.
I longed to possess a Sisley and a Degas, and I worshipped Manet. His
_Olympia_ seemed to me the greatest picture of modern times, and _Le
Déjeuner sur l’Herbe_ moved me profoundly. These works seemed to me the
last word in painting.
I will not describe the pictures that Strickland showed me.
Descriptions of pictures are always dull, and these, besides, are
familiar to all who take an interest in such things. Now that his
influence has so enormously affected modern painting, now that others
have charted the country which he was among the first to explore,
Strickland’s pictures, seen for the first time, would find the mind
more prepared for them; but it must be remembered that I had never seen
anything of the sort. First of all I was taken aback by what seemed to
me the clumsiness of his technique. Accustomed to the drawing of the
old masters, and convinced that Ingres was the greatest draughtsman of
recent times, I thought that Strickland drew very badly. I knew nothing
of the simplification at which he aimed. I remember a still-life of
oranges on a plate, and I was bothered because the plate was not round
and the oranges were lop-sided. The portraits were a little larger than
life-size, and this gave them an ungainly look. To my eyes the faces
looked like caricatures. They were painted in a way that was entirely
new to me. The landscapes puzzled me even more. There were two or three
pictures of the forest at Fontainebleau and several of streets in
Paris: my first feeling was that they might have been painted by a
drunken cabdriver. I was perfectly bewildered. The colour seemed to me