The Moon and Sixpence
extraordinarily crude. It passed through my mind that the whole thing
was a stupendous, incomprehensible farce. Now that I look back I am
more than ever impressed by Stroeve’s acuteness. He saw from the first
that here was a revolution in art, and he recognised in its beginnings
the genius which now all the world allows.
But if I was puzzled and disconcerted, I was not unimpressed. Even I,
in my colossal ignorance, could not but feel that here, trying to
express itself, was real power. I was excited and interested. I felt
that these pictures had something to say to me that was very important
for me to know, but I could not tell what it was. They seemed to me
ugly, but they suggested without disclosing a secret of momentous
significance. They were strangely tantalising. They gave me an emotion
that I could not analyse. They said something that words were powerless
to utter. I fancy that Strickland saw vaguely some spiritual meaning in
material things that was so strange that he could only suggest it with
halting symbols. It was as though he found in the chaos of the universe
a new pattern, and were attempting clumsily, with anguish of soul, to
set it down. I saw a tormented spirit striving for the release of
expression.
I turned to him.
“I wonder if you haven’t mistaken your medium,” I said.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I think you’re trying to say something, I don’t quite know what it is,
but I’m not sure that the best way of saying it is by means of
painting.”
When I imagined that on seeing his pictures I should get a clue to the
understanding of his strange character I was mistaken. They merely
increased the astonishment with which he filled me. I was more at sea
than ever. The only thing that seemed clear to me—and perhaps even this
was fanciful—was that he was passionately striving for liberation from
some power that held him. But what the power was and what line the
liberation would take remained obscure. Each one of us is alone in the
world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his
fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that
their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to
others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to
accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable
to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a
country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of
beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the
banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with
ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener’s
aunt is in the house.
The final impression I received was of a prodigious effort to express
some state of the soul, and in this effort, I fancied, must be sought
the explanation of what so utterly perplexed me. It was evident that
colours and forms had a significance for Strickland that was peculiar
to himself. He was under an intolerable necessity to convey something
that he felt, and he created them with that intention alone. He did not
hesitate to simplify or to distort if he could get nearer to that
unknown thing he sought. Facts were nothing to him, for beneath the
mass of irrelevant incidents he looked for something significant to
himself. It was as though he had become aware of the soul of the
universe and were compelled to express it.
Though these pictures confused and puzzled me, I could not be unmoved
by the emotion that was patent in them; and, I knew not why, I felt in
myself a feeling that with regard to Strickland was the last I had ever
expected to experience. I felt an overwhelming compassion.
“I think I know now why you surrendered to your feeling for Blanche
Stroeve,” I said to him.
“Why?”
“I think your courage failed. The weakness of your body communicated
itself to your soul. I do not know what infinite yearning possesses
you, so that you are driven to a perilous, lonely search for some goal
where you expect to find a final release from the spirit that torments
you. I see you as the eternal pilgrim to some shrine that perhaps does
not exist. I do not know to what inscrutable Nirvana you aim. Do you
know yourself? Perhaps it is Truth and Freedom that you seek, and for a
moment you thought that you might find release in Love. I think your
tired soul sought rest in a woman’s arms, and when you found no rest
there you hated her. You had no pity for her, because you have no pity
for yourself. And you killed her out of fear, because you trembled
still at the danger you had barely escaped.”
He smiled dryly and pulled his beard.
“You are a dreadful sentimentalist, my poor friend.”
A week later I heard by chance that Strickland had gone to Marseilles.
I never saw him again.
Chapter XLIII
Looking back, I realise that what I have written about Charles
Strickland must seem very unsatisfactory. I have given incidents that
came to my knowledge, but they remain obscure because I do not know the
reasons that led to them. The strangest, Strickland’s determination to
become a painter, seems to be arbitrary; and though it must have had
causes in the circumstances of his life, I am ignorant of them. From
his own conversation I was able to glean nothing. If I were writing a
novel, rather than narrating such facts as I know of a curious
personality, I should have invented much to account for this change of
heart. I think I should have shown a strong vocation in boyhood,
crushed by the will of his father or sacrificed to the necessity of
earning a living; I should have pictured him impatient of the
restraints of life; and in the struggle between his passion for art and
the duties of his station I could have aroused sympathy for him. I
should so have made him a more imposing figure. Perhaps it would have
been possible to see in him a new Prometheus. There was here, maybe,
the opportunity for a modern version of the hero who for the good of
mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned. It is always a
moving subject.
On the other hand, I might have found his motives in the influence of
the married relation. There are a dozen ways in which this might be
managed. A latent gift might reveal itself on acquaintance with the
painters and writers whose society his wife sought; or domestic
incompatability might turn him upon himself; a love affair might fan
into bright flame a fire which I could have shown smouldering dimly in
his heart. I think then I should have drawn Mrs. Strickland quite
differently. I should have abandoned the facts and made her a nagging,
tiresome woman, or else a bigoted one with no sympathy for the claims
of the spirit. I should have made Strickland’s marriage a long torment
from which escape was the only possible issue. I think I should have
emphasised his patience with the unsuitable mate, and the compassion
which made him unwilling to throw off the yoke that oppressed him. I
should certainly have eliminated the children.
An effective story might also have been made by bringing him into
contact with some old painter whom the pressure of want or the desire
for commercial success had made false to the genius of his youth, and
who, seeing in Strickland the possibilities which himself had wasted,
influenced him to forsake all and follow the divine tyranny of art. I
think there would have been something ironic in the picture of the
successful old man, rich and honoured, living in another the life which
he, though knowing it was the better part, had not had the strength to
pursue.
The facts are much duller. Strickland, a boy fresh from school, went
into a broker’s office without any feeling of distaste. Until he
married he led the ordinary life of his fellows, gambling mildly on the
Exchange, interested to the extent of a sovereign or two on the result
of the Derby or the Oxford and Cambridge Race. I think he boxed a
little in his spare time. On his chimney-piece he had photographs of
Mrs. Langtry and Mary Anderson. He read _Punch_ and the _Sporting
Times_. He went to dances in Hampstead.
It matters less that for so long I should have lost sight of him. The
years during which he was struggling to acquire proficiency in a
difficult art were monotonous, and I do not know that there was
anything significant in the shifts to which he was put to earn enough
money to keep him. An account of them would be an account of the things
he had seen happen to other people. I do not think they had any effect
on his own character. He must have acquired experiences which would
form abundant material for a picaresque novel of modern Paris, but he
remained aloof, and judging from his conversation there was nothing in
those years that had made a particular impression on him. Perhaps when
he went to Paris he was too old to fall a victim to the glamour of his
environment. Strange as it may seem, he always appeared to me not only
practical, but immensely matter-of-fact. I suppose his life during this
period was romantic, but he certainly saw no romance in it. It may be
that in order to realise the romance of life you must have something of
the actor in you; and, capable of standing outside yourself, you must
be able to watch your actions with an interest at once detached and
absorbed. But no one was more single-minded than Strickland. I never
knew anyone who was less self-conscious. But it is unfortunate that I
can give no description of the arduous steps by which he reached such
mastery over his art as he ever acquired; for if I could show him
undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair
at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the
artist’s bitterest enemy, I might excite some sympathy for a
personality which, I am all too conscious, must appear singularly
devoid of charm. But I have nothing to go on. I never once saw
Strickland at work, nor do I know that anyone else did. He kept the
secret of his struggles to himself. If in the loneliness of his studio
he wrestled desperately with the Angel of the Lord he never allowed a
soul to divine his anguish.
When I come to his connection with Blanche Stroeve I am exasperated by
the fragmentariness of the facts at my disposal. To give my story
coherence I should describe the progress of their tragic union, but I
know nothing of the three months during which they lived together. I do
not know how they got on or what they talked about. After all, there
are twenty-four hours in the day, and the summits of emotion can only
be reached at rare intervals. I can only imagine how they passed the
rest of the time. While the light lasted and so long as Blanche’s
strength endured, I suppose that Strickland painted, and it must have
irritated her when she saw him absorbed in his work. As a mistress she
did not then exist for him, but only as a model; and then there were
long hours in which they lived side by side in silence. It must have
frightened her. When Strickland suggested that in her surrender to him
there was a sense of triumph over Dirk Stroeve, because he had come to
her help in her extremity, he opened the door to many a dark
conjecture. I hope it was not true. It seems to me rather horrible. But
who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those
who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions. When
Blanche saw that, notwithstanding his moments of passion, Strickland
remained aloof, she must have been filled with dismay, and even in
those moments I surmise that she realised that to him she was not an
individual, but an instrument of pleasure; he was a stranger still, and
she tried to bind him to herself with pathetic arts. She strove to
ensnare him with comfort and would not see that comfort meant nothing