A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
"May I ask what that red patch in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas is?" asked Anne.
She was looking at "Art and Need." The picture was almost done. Weeks of weather as variable as Anne's moods had passed. Now the days were longer, and the changed light of the sun had become a prophecy of spring.
"That? Grass, in the sun," answered Howard, squeezing more red paint from a tube.
"And the allegorical significance of the grass?"
"Depends upon the spectator," answered the artist. "It means that which it means to you. Symbolic art is no ready-made product. Its office is to evoke, to draw forth from you, to make you a creator."
Anne groaned. Howard's eyes twinkled.
"In all impressionist work, of course, the colours blend in your eye, not on the canvas. Here, in addition to that, the various elements of truth must blend in your soul in order to have coherence. 'All art is what you do when you look at it.'"
"Isn't that a subterfuge of the artist who hasn't energy to make his work perfect?"
"Perfection is limitation," answered Howard gravely. "Symbolism means trying to say more than can be said. The message transcends expression. Its imperfection is its greatness."
"Then there ought to be two kinds of expression," said Anne. "If the Art Club accepts this, I am going to write an explanatory poem for you to tack to the frame. It is positive cruelty to the masses to give them so much hidden meaning."
"The picture will speak to those who can listen. If you are the right spectator its meaning will flash upon you. For this is given it the touch of strangeness, of mystery. The soul of things can be apprehended only by the soul. The interpretation is the measure of your nature."
"I feel very small," said Anne. "Please excuse me for living."
Anne did not try to work. She sat lazily in her grandfather's arm-chair, thinking. Once she looked up with her sauciest smile.
"Don't you think," she asked, "that you have too many fine ideas about art to be a real artist?"
"May I return the compliment with interest?"
Anne dropped into a reminiscent mood.
"You always did things like that," she said. "Do you remember that when we made mud pies you always did cherubs and angels?"
"And you made dogs and cats," rejoined Howard. "Doesn't it all seem a thousand years ago?"
"I remember your Judgment Day scene. There was a great shapeless figure in the centre, and on either side rows of beings made of round balls of mud and little sticks. The sheep had white legs and arms. You peeled the bark off for them. You left it on for the goats. It was all very dramatic. Your art always was half literature."
Howard said nothing.
"And now," continued Anne audaciously, "it's all literature."
"I remember one woolly lamb that you made out of clay," the young man remarked. "It looked as if it could bleat. Your father was so pleased. And I was very proud of it."
"That was your way," said Anne. "You liked to hear me praised. I was horribly jealous. Once I hid in the parlour and lay on the floor kicking and crying, when you had drawn an angel and father had called you a genius."
"It looked just like you, Nannie," said the artist. "I can see now its little round cheeks. Its robe was patterned after your blue gingham apron."
Mrs. Kent glanced at Anne's flushed face, and renewed her resolve to help this young man win his battle. Helen opened her eyes wide at the sound of the old child-name, then closed them again. After all, it was natural that he should use it.
"Well," said Anne, almost forgetting her own confusion in her enjoyment of Helen's surprise, "you made a good beginning. I am sorry to see you taking up a theory of art that seems to me cowardly. Your idealism shirks the battle with things as they are."
"But you are no more a realist than I am."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean," said Howard, laying down his brush and looking at the pictures on the walls, "that you put into those faces all sorts of heroic emotions that the people never had. You make the wrinkles deeper than they really are, and you idealize the feelings that they stand for. Your people all look hungry, and not for bread and butter."
"Please speak slowly so that I can take all this in," said Anne.
"Look at that old sailor," the young man continued relentlessly. "He is intense, pathetic. There's no recognition in that face of his—love for tobacco, for instance. It is all a little bit hysterical, and feminine."
"It isn't feminine," said Anne angrily. "Say anything but that."
She went to work in silence.
"Mr. Stanton, you are getting thin," remarked Mrs. Kent abruptly. "That domestic experiment will ruin your health. Aren't you tired of it?"
"It palls, at times," he confessed.
"And isn't your night school wearing on you?"
"It takes some strength from my work, but I expected that."
"How beautifully our various efforts neutralize each other," said Anne pensively. "That lecturing keeps you from painting more symbolic pictures."
"Thank you," said Howard. "No, Mrs. Kent, my work does not suffer much. And I have made a deliberate choice. I simply cannot bury myself in art dreams in a world so full of suffering and ignorance and crime."
"I don't see," said Anne crossly, from her corner, "why I've always been cursed with a desire to do my own work. Life is so short, and the evenings come so soon. How can we be acquitted if we do other people's tasks, and leave undone our own? It seems to me as if nowadays everybody is so bored with his own life that he wants to live somebody else's life."
"Oh," cried Helen. "Don't say that!"
"It isn't that," said Howard. "People are just trying to forget their own demands."
"A deliberate determination to forget yourself amounts to a deliberate determination to remember," Anne remarked sententiously. "I suppose that I am mean and selfish and unenlightened," she added, clenching her little hand; "but I'd rather be able to paint well those wrinkles around my old sailor's eyes, than to teach all the masses in the world how to draw."
"You don't love human nature enough," said Howard.
"You don't love it enough to paint it as it is," Anne retorted. "All your idealism is made up of disrespect for the facts of life."