As we walked along I reflected on a circumstance which all that I had lately heard about Strickland forced on my attention.Here, on this remote island, he seemed to have aroused none of the detestation with which he was regarded at home, but compassion rather; and his vagaries were accepted with tolerance.To these people, native and European, he was a queer fish, but they were used to queer fish, and they took him for granted; the world was full of odd persons, who did odd things; and perhaps they knew that a man is not what he wants to be, but what he must be.In England and France he was the square peg in the round hole, but here the holes were any sort of shape, and no sort of peg was quite amiss.I do not think he was any gentler here, less selfish or less brutal, but the circumstances were more favourable.If he had spent his life amid these surroundings he might have passed for no worse a man than another.He received here what he neither expected nor wanted among his own people-- sympathy.
I tried to tell Captain Brunot something of the astonishment with which this filled me, and for a little while he did not answer.
"It is not strange that I, at all events, should have had sympathy for him," he said at last, "for, though perhaps neither of us knew it, we were both aiming at the same thing.""What on earth can it be that two people so dissimilar as you and Strickland could aim at?" I asked, smiling.
"Beauty."
"A large order," I murmured.
"Do you know how men can be so obsessed by love that they are deaf and blind to everything else in the world? They are as little their own masters as the slaves chained to the benches of a galley.The passion that held Strickland in bondage was no less tyrannical than love.""How strange that you should say that!" I answered."For long ago I had the idea that he was possessed of a devil.""And the passion that held Strickland was a passion to create beauty.It gave him no peace. It urged him hither and thither. He was eternallya pilgrim, haunted by a divine nostalgia, and the demon within him was ruthless.There are men whose desire for truth is so great that to attain it they will shatter the very foundation of their world.Of such was Strickland, only beauty with him took the place of truth.I could only feel for him a profound compassion.""That is strange also.A man whom he had deeply wronged told me that he felt a great pity for him." I was silent for a moment."I wonder if there you have found the explanation of a character which has always seemed to me inexplicable.How did you hit on it?"He turned to me with a smile.
"Did I not tell you that I, too, in my way was an artist? I realised in myself the same desire as animated him.But whereas his medium was paint, mine has been life."Then Captain Brunot told me a story which I must repeat, since, if only by way of contrast, it adds something to my impression of Strickland.It has also to my mind a beauty of its own.
