"You are indeed.You're quite off the hinge.What's the meaning of this new fad?" And he tossed me, with visible irreverence, a drawing in which I happened to have depicted both my majestic models.Iasked if he didn't think it good, and he replied that it struck him as execrable, given the sort of thing I had always represented myself to him as wishing to arrive at; but I let that pass, I was so anxious to see exactly what he meant.The two figures in the picture looked colossal, but I supposed this was NOT what he meant, inasmuch as, for aught he knew to the contrary, I might have been trying for that.Imaintained that I was working exactly in the same way as when he last had done me the honour to commend me."Well, there's a big hole somewhere," he answered; "wait a bit and I'll discover it." Idepended upon him to do so: where else was the fresh eye? But he produced at last nothing more luminous than "I don't know--I don't like your types." This was lame, for a critic who had never consented to discuss with me anything but the question of execution, the direction of strokes and the mystery of values.
"In the drawings you've been looking at I think my types are very handsome.""Oh, they won't do!"
"I've had a couple of new models."
"I see you have.THEY won't do."
"Are you very sure of that?"
"Absolutely--they're stupid."
"You mean _I_ am--for I ought to get round that.""You CAN'T--with such people.Who are they?"I told him, as far as was necessary, and he declared, heartlessly:
"Ce sont des gens qu'il faut mettre a la porte.""You've never seen them; they're awfully good," I compassionately objected.
"Not seen them? Why, all this recent work of yours drops to pieces with them.It's all I want to see of them.""No one else has said anything against it--the Cheapside people are pleased.""Everyone else is an ass, and the Cheapside people the biggest asses of all.Come, don't pretend, at this time of day, to have pretty illusions about the public, especially about publishers and editors.
It's not for SUCH animals you work--it's for those who know, coloro che sanno; so keep straight for ME if you can't keep straight for yourself.There's a certain sort of thing you tried for from the first--and a very good thing it is.But this twaddle isn't IN it."When I talked with Hawley later about "Rutland Ramsay" and its possible successors he declared that I must get back into my boat again or I would go to the bottom.His voice in short was the voice of warning.
I noted the warning, but I didn't turn my friends out of doors.They bored me a good deal; but the very fact that they bored me admonished me not to sacrifice them--if there was anything to be done with them--simply to irritation.As I look back at this phase they seem to me to have pervaded my life not a little.I have a vision of them as most of the time in my studio, seated, against the wall, on an old velvet bench to be out of the way, and looking like a pair of patient courtiers in a royal ante-chamber.I am convinced that during the coldest weeks of the winter they held their ground because it saved them fire.Their newness was losing its gloss, and it was impossible not to feel that they were objects of charity.Whenever Miss Churm arrived they went away, and after I was fairly launched in "Rutland Ramsay" Miss Churm arrived pretty often.They managed to express to me tacitly that they supposed I wanted her for the low life of the book, and I let them suppose it, since they had attempted to study the work--it was lying about the studio--without discovering that it dealt only with the highest circles.They had dipped into the most brilliant of our novelists without deciphering many passages.Istill took an hour from them, now and again, in spite of Jack Hawley's warning: it would be time enough to dismiss them, if dismissal should be necessary, when the rigour of the season was over.Hawley had made their acquaintance--he had met them at my fireside--and thought them a ridiculous pair.Learning that he was a painter they tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but he looked at them, across the big room, as if they were miles away: they were a compendium of everything that he most objected to in the social system of his country.Such people as that, all convention and patent-leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no business in a studio.A studio was a place to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair of feather beds?
The main inconvenience I suffered at their hands was that, at first, I was shy of letting them discover how my artful little servant had begun to sit to me for "Rutland Ramsay." They knew that I had been odd enough (they were prepared by this time to allow oddity to artists,) to pick a foreign vagabond out of the streets, when I might have had a person with whiskers and credentials; but it was some time before they learned how high I rated his accomplishments.They found him in an attitude more than once, but they never doubted I was doing him as an organ-grinder.There were several things they never guessed, and one of them was that for a striking scene in the novel, in which a footman briefly figured, it occurred to me to make use of Major Monarch as the menial.I kept putting this off, I didn't like to ask him to don the livery--besides the difficulty of finding a livery to fit him.At last, one day late in the winter, when I was at work on the despised Oronte (he caught one's idea in an instant), and was in the glow of feeling that I was going very straight, they came in, the Major and his wife, with their society laugh about nothing (there was less and less to laugh at), like country-callers--they always reminded me of that--who have walked across the park after church and are presently persuaded to stay to luncheon.
Luncheon was over, but they could stay to tea--I knew they wanted it.
