A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
Mr. Stanton's great picture was begun. In one corner of Anne Bradford's studio Helen posed for Art, asleep. The picture was to be symbolic. It was the old myth of the Sleeping Beauty worked over with a modern interpretation. A lovely woman, dreaming, with half-shut eyes: that was Art. A ragged figure creeping up and putting a wasted hand through the hedge of thorn: that was Need. The sleeper was to be awakened, not by the old-fashioned lover's kiss, but by a cry for the new, better, all-embracing love, the love of human kind.
"I simply can't do my work for watching you," said Anne at the first sitting. "I am eager to see how you are going to paint all those ideas about art and the people."
"I am not going to paint. I am going to suggest," answered Howard.
"But you are working with paint," remonstrated Anne. "Whatever you do must be done with that. How can you paint philosophy?"
The work went on while autumn drifted into late November. Now and then dead leaves were blown into the studio through the open skylight. Sometimes rain fell on the roof. Mrs. Kent, embroidering by the fire, listened, in awe tempered with amusement, to fierce debates concerning art and life. Her three young friends played too deftly with notions concerning human existence, she sometimes thought. They were "wise because until now nothing had happened to them."
Helen Wistar drank in eagerly all her master's teaching. As he worked he talked much about merging one's life in the life of the whole. It was well for the girl that her eyes were closed, otherwise Howard might have grown to understand the look in them. Only Anne understood that look.
To these remarks Anne listened with an angry sense of her own limitations.
"I never heard so many sublime ideas in my life," she said mournfully to herself one day. "People as good as that are no company for me."
"Speaking of sharing the hardships of the poor," she asked suddenly, "did you go to live with Mrs. Orr, or did Annabel make that story up?"
"No. It is true," answered the young man, reddening a little.
"I knew it!" cried Helen triumphantly. Howard failed to see the sudden beauty of her wide-opened eyes.
"Are you comfortable?" asked Mrs. Kent anxiously.
"Not luxuriously comfortable," answered Howard with a laugh. "I rather think that my pillows are filled with green apples. And the table—well, unlike Dives, we do not fare sumptuously every day. The toast is always cold, for instance."
"You are a new kind of hero, aren't you," murmured Anne, "ready to eat cold toast for the good of the masses."
"The children are very satisfactory, however. You are going to see Annabel immortalized in allegory on the walls of the City Hall. They delight in posing. The little brother makes a famous cherub."
The young impressionist worked rapidly. Anne almost held her breath as she watched his sweeping strokes. His touch was firm, despite his eagerness. The drawing had been finished; the colour was being sketched in. Grass and trees were violet. That was necessary to give the true values. The sky was pale green. Art's lovely hair, its auburn shades brightened to red,—for that was what it meant to him, the artist said,—fell over the side of the couch and curled round one of the branches of the hedge of thorn. The light effects were mystic, wonderful.
The two artists ceased to quarrel over beauty, line, and colour. They were absorbed in considering the intellectual values of their work.
"So this is the way," said Anne one afternoon, deserting her own easel, "in which you paint the hardship and the sadness and the pathos of common people's lives."
"This is the way in which I make a symbol of it. I am not painting a single object. My aim is broader than that. The merely individual is eliminated for the sake of the typical. That figure embodies a truth"
"Not anatomical truth," said Anne dryly.
"Frankly, not anatomical truth."
"Wouldn't it be just as symbolic if Art looked able to stand up, if she chose?"
"That isn't the point," answered Howard. "She has something else to do. She clothes as with a garment a spiritual verity."
"I'd rather paint the things I see than the things I dream," said Anne sturdily.
"I prefer to paint the things I both see and dream," retorted Howard. "The artist cannot afford to let brute fact master him. Art is no servile copyist. Her own divine idea must shape her work."
"Of course! That is one of the commonplaces of the studio. But there ought to be some correspondence between outward fact and one's inner sense of things. You can't spin truth wholly out of your own brain. I am sure that this attempt to paint abstractions is only a fad. You will outgrow it."
Mrs. Kent smiled. She liked the way in which the two friends patronized each other. Helen started in dismay.
An hour passed. Again Anne's voice broke the silence.
"Isn't that colouring an impertinence to nature? Do I bother you? Am I a nuisance?"
"Rather."
"I wish to learn," she remarked meekly.
"You are an exceedingly belligerent pupil."
"I'll go away in a minute. I just want to ask why you degrade part of nature as unworthy of your work. It all seems to me worth reproducing as perfectly as possible—the little common things that the unenlightened do not see. Every trace of human expression is sacred to me."
"I simply go one step further. You copy facts, you say. I try to distill from facts an inner meaning. I try to express my sense of things. It is my reaching out after the unattainable, la verité vraie."
"Nobody," said Anne solemnly, "has any right to know the abstract meanings of things until he has grasped the significance of the concrete."
"But your realist, in copying the concrete, fails to represent any thought of his own."
"Perhaps," suggested Anne, "he thinks that he is putting down fragments of a larger thought than his own. He may be humble enough to realize that he hasn't grasped all truth. In doing that unpretentious work doesn't he try to suggest the worth and the mystery of every meanest fact of life?"
"That work lacks significance. It gives you no chance to express your idea of the meaning of things."
"And yours lacks reverence," retorted Anne. "It gives you no opportunity to express a belief in the Creator's meaning in things."
Howard sighed in mock despair.
"Miss Wistar is the only person who understands me," he said, with a look that brought hot blood to the girl's cheeks. "If my work amounts to anything it will all be due to her."