________________________________________________
_ I did not know why Strickland had suddenly offered to show
them to me. I welcomed the opportunity. A man's work reveals him.
In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he
wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true
knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which
he is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which cross
his face unknown to him. Sometimes people carry to such
perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they
actually become the person they seem. But in his book or his
picture the real man delivers himself defenceless.
His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity. The lathe
painted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe.
No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.
To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual work
without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.
As I walked up the endless stairs of the house in which
Strickland lived, I confess that I was a little excited.
It seemed to me that I was on the threshold of a surprising
adventure. I looked about the room with curiosity. It was
even smaller and more bare than I remembered it. I wondered
what those friends of mine would say who demanded vast
studios, and vowed they could not work unless all the
conditions were to their liking.
"You'd better stand there," he said, pointing to a spot from
which, presumably, he fancied I could see to best advantage
what he had to show me.
"You don't want me to talk, I suppose," I said.
"No, blast you; I want you to hold your tongue."
He placed a picture on the easel, and let me look at it for a
minute or two; then took it down and put another in its place.
I think he showed me about thirty canvases. It was the result
of the six years during which he had been painting. He had
never sold a picture. The canvases were of different sizes.
The smaller were pictures of still-life and the largest were
landscapes. There were about half a dozen portraits.
"That is the lot," he said at last.
I wish I could say that I recognised at once their beauty and
their great originality. Now that I have seen many of them
again and the rest are familiar to me in reproductions, I am
astonished that at first sight I was bitterly disappointed.
I felt nothing of the peculiar thrill which it is the property
of art to give. The impression that Strickland's pictures
gave me was disconcerting; and the fact remains, always to
reproach me, that I never even thought of buying any.
I missed a wonderful chance. Most of them have found their way
into museums, and the rest are the treasured possessions of
wealthy amateurs. I try to find excuses for myself. I think
that my taste is good, but I am conscious that it has no originality.
I know very little about painting, and I wander
along trails that others have blazed for me. At that time I
had the greatest admiration for the impressionists. I longed
to possess a Sisley and a Degas, and I worshipped Manet.
His Olympia seemed to me the greatest picture of modern times,
and Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe moved me profoundly.
These works seemed to me the last word in painting.
I will not describe the pictures that Strickland showed me.
Descriptions of pictures are always dull, and these, besides,
are familiar to all who take an interest in such things. Now
that his influence has so enormously affected modern painting,
now that others have charted the country which he was among
the first to explore, Strickland's pictures, seen for the
first time, would find the mind more prepared for them; but it
must be remembered that I had never seen anything of the sort.
First of all I was taken aback by what seemed to me the
clumsiness of his technique. Accustomed to the drawing of the
old masters, and convinced that Ingres was the greatest
draughtsman of recent times, I thought that Strickland drew
very badly. I knew nothing of the simplification at which he aimed.
I remember a still-life of oranges on a plate, and I
was bothered because the plate was not round and the oranges
were lop-sided. The portraits were a little larger than
life-size, and this gave them an ungainly look. To my eyes the
faces looked like caricatures. They were painted in a way
that was entirely new to me. The landscapes puzzled me even more.
There were two or three pictures of the forest at
Fontainebleau and several of streets in Paris: my first feeling
was that they might have been painted by a drunken cabdriver.
I was perfectly bewildered. The colour seemed to
me 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. _
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