Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

by William Somerset Maugham

  Philip liked the daring picturesqueness of the Americans’ costume; he thought it showed the romantic spirit. Miss Price asked him the time.

  “I must be getting along to the studio,” she said. “Are you going to the sketch classes?”

  Philip did not know anything about them, and she told him that from five to six every evening a model sat, from whom anyone who liked could go and draw at the cost of fifty centimes. They had a different model every day, and it was very good practice.

  “I don’t suppose you’re good enough yet for that. You’d better wait a bit.”

  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t try. I haven’t got anything else to do.”

  They got up and walked to the studio. Philip could not tell from her manner whether Miss Price wished him to walk with her or preferred to walk alone. He remained from sheer embarrassment, not knowing how to leave her; but she would not talk; she answered his questions in an ungracious manner.

  A man was standing at the studio door with a large dish into which each person as he went in dropped his half franc. The studio was much fuller than it had been in the morning, and there was not the preponderance of English and Americans; nor were women there in so large a proportion. Philip felt the assemblage was more the sort of thing he had expected. It was very warm, and the air quickly grew fetid. It was an old man who sat this time, with a vast gray beard, and Philip tried to put into practice the little he had learned in the morning; but he made a poor job of it; he realised that he could not draw nearly as well as he thought. He glanced enviously at one or two sketches of men who sat near him, and wondered whether he would ever be able to use the charcoal with that mastery. The hour passed quickly. Not wishing to press himself upon Miss Price he sat down at some distance from her, and at the end, as he passed her on his way out, she asked him brusquely how he had got on.

  “Not very well,” he smiled.

  “If you’d condescended to come and sit near me I could have given you some hints. I suppose you thought yourself too grand.”

  “No, it wasn’t that. I was afraid you’d think me a nuisance.”

  “When I do that I’ll tell you sharp enough.”

  Philip saw that in her uncouth way she was offering him help.

  “Well, tomorrow I’ll just force myself upon you.”

  “I don’t mind,” she answered.

  Philip went out and wondered what he should do with himself till dinner. He was eager to do something characteristic. Absinthe! of course it was indicated, and so, sauntering towards the station, he seated himself outside a cafe and ordered it. He drank with nausea and satisfaction. He found the taste disgusting, but the moral effect magnificent; he felt every inch an art-student; and since he drank on an empty stomach his spirits presently grew very high. He watched the crowds, and felt all men were his brothers. He was happy. When he reached Gravier’s the table at which Clutton sat was full, but as soon as he saw Philip limping along he called out to him. They made room. The dinner was frugal, a plate of soup, a dish of meat, fruit, cheese, and half a bottle of wine; but Philip paid no attention to what he ate. He took note of the men at the table. Flanagan was there again: he was an American, a short, snub-nosed youth with a jolly face and a laughing mouth. He wore a Norfolk jacket of bold pattern, a blue stock round his neck, and a tweed cap of fantastic shape. At that time impressionism reigned in the Latin Quarter, but its victory over the older schools was still recent; and Carolus-Duran, Bouguereau, and their like were set up against Manet, Monet, and Degas. To appreciate these was still a sign of grace. Whistler was an influence strong with the English and his compatriots, and the discerning collected Japanese prints. The old masters were tested by new standards. The esteem in which Raphael had been for centuries held was a matter of derision to wise young men. They offered to give all his works for Velasquez’ head of Philip IV in the National Gallery. Philip found that a discussion on art was raging. Lawson, whom he had met at luncheon, sat opposite to him. He was a thin youth with a freckled face and red hair. He had very bright green eyes. As Philip sat down he fixed them on him and remarked suddenly:

  “Raphael was only tolerable when he painted other people’s pictures. When he painted Peruginos or Pinturichios he was charming; when he painted Raphaels he was,” with a scornful shrug, “Raphael.”

  Lawson spoke so aggressively that Philip was taken aback, but he was not obliged to answer because Flanagan broke in impatiently.

  “Oh, to hell with art!” he cried. “Let’s get ginny.”

  “You were ginny last night, Flanagan,” said Lawson.

  “Nothing to what I mean to be tonight,” he answered. “Fancy being in Pa-ris and thinking of nothing but art all the time.” He spoke with a broad Western accent. “My, it is good to be alive.” He gathered himself together and then banged his fist on the table. “To hell with art, I say.”

  “You not only say it, but you say it with tiresome iteration,” said

  Clutton severely.

  There was another American at the table. He was dressed like those fine fellows whom Philip had seen that afternoon in the Luxembourg. He had a handsome face, thin, ascetic, with dark eyes; he wore his fantastic garb with the dashing air of a buccaneer. He had a vast quantity of dark hair which fell constantly over his eyes, and his most frequent gesture was to throw back his head dramatically to get some long wisp out of the way. He began to talk of the Olympia by Manet, which then hung in the Luxembourg.

  “I stood in front of it for an hour today, and I tell you it’s not a good picture.”

  Lawson put down his knife and fork. His green eyes flashed fire, he gasped with rage; but he could be seen imposing calm upon himself.

  “It’s very interesting to hear the mind of the untutored savage,” he said.

  “Will you tell us why it isn’t a good picture?”

  Before the American could answer someone else broke in vehemently.

  “D’you mean to say you can look at the painting of that flesh and say it’s not good?”

  “I don’t say that. I think the right breast is very well painted.”

  “The right breast be damned,” shouted Lawson. “The whole thing’s a miracle of painting.”

  He began to describe in detail the beauties of the picture, but at this table at Gravier’s they who spoke at length spoke for their own edification. No one listened to him. The American interrupted angrily.

  “You don’t mean to say you think the head’s good?”

  Lawson, white with passion now, began to defend the head; but Clutton, who had been sitting in silence with a look on his face of good-humoured scorn, broke in.

  “Give him the head. We don’t want the head. It doesn’t affect the picture.”

  “All right, I’ll give you the head,” cried Lawson. “Take the head and be damned to you.”

  “What about the black line?” cried the American, triumphantly pushing back a wisp of hair which nearly fell in his soup. “You don’t see a black line round objects in nature.”

  “Oh, God, send down fire from heaven to consume the blasphemer,” said Lawson. “What has nature got to do with it? No one knows what’s in nature and what isn’t! The world sees nature through the eyes of the artist. Why, for centuries it saw horses jumping a fence with all their legs extended, and by Heaven, sir, they were extended. It saw shadows black until Monet discovered they were coloured, and by Heaven, sir, they were black. If we choose to surround objects with a black line, the world will see the black line, and there will be a black line; and if we paint grass red and cows blue, it’ll see them red and blue, and, by Heaven, they will be red and blue.”

  “To hell with art,” murmured Flanagan. “I want to get ginny.”

  Lawson took no notice of the interruption.

  “Now look here, when Olympia was shown at the Salon, Zola — amid the jeers of the Philistines and the hisses of the pompiers, the academicians, and the public, Zola said: ‘I look forward to the day when Manet’s picture will hang in
the Louvre opposite the Odalisque of Ingres, and it will not be the Odalisque which will gain by comparison.’ It’ll be there. Every day I see the time grow nearer. In ten years the Olympia will be in the Louvre.”

  “Never,” shouted the American, using both hands now with a sudden desperate attempt to get his hair once for all out of the way. “In ten years that picture will be dead. It’s only a fashion of the moment. No picture can live that hasn’t got something which that picture misses by a million miles.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Great art can’t exist without a moral element.”

  “Oh God!” cried Lawson furiously. “I knew it was that. He wants morality.”

  He joined his hands and held them towards heaven in supplication. “Oh,

  Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus, what did you do when you

  discovered America?”

  “Ruskin says…”

  But before he could add another word, Clutton rapped with the handle of his knife imperiously on the table.

  “Gentlemen,” he said in a stern voice, and his huge nose positively wrinkled with passion, “a name has been mentioned which I never thought to hear again in decent society. Freedom of speech is all very well, but we must observe the limits of common propriety. You may talk of Bouguereau if you will: there is a cheerful disgustingness in the sound which excites laughter; but let us not sully our chaste lips with the names of J. Ruskin, G. F. Watts, or E. B. Jones.”

  “Who was Ruskin anyway?” asked Flanagan.

  “He was one of the Great Victorians. He was a master of English style.”

  “Ruskin’s style — a thing of shreds and purple patches,” said Lawson. “Besides, damn the Great Victorians. Whenever I open a paper and see Death of a Great Victorian, I thank Heaven there’s one more of them gone. Their only talent was longevity, and no artist should be allowed to live after he’s forty; by then a man has done his best work, all he does after that is repetition. Don’t you think it was the greatest luck in the world for them that Keats, Shelley, Bonnington, and Byron died early? What a genius we should think Swinburne if he had perished on the day the first series of Poems and Ballads was published!”

  The suggestion pleased, for no one at the table was more than twenty-four, and they threw themselves upon it with gusto. They were unanimous for once. They elaborated. Someone proposed a vast bonfire made out of the works of the Forty Academicians into which the Great Victorians might be hurled on their fortieth birthday. The idea was received with acclamation. Carlyle and Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, G. F. Watts, E. B. Jones, Dickens, Thackeray, they were hurried into the flames; Mr. Gladstone, John Bright, and Cobden; there was a moment’s discussion about George Meredith, but Matthew Arnold and Emerson were given up cheerfully. At last came Walter Pater.

  “Not Walter Pater,” murmured Philip.

  Lawson stared at him for a moment with his green eyes and then nodded.

  “You’re quite right, Walter Pater is the only justification for Mona Lisa.

  D’you know Cronshaw? He used to know Pater.”

  “Who’s Cronshaw?” asked Philip.

  “Cronshaw’s a poet. He lives here. Let’s go to the Lilas.”

  La Closerie des Lilas was a cafe to which they often went in the evening after dinner, and here Cronshaw was invariably to be found between the hours of nine at night and two in the morning. But Flanagan had had enough of intellectual conversation for one evening, and when Lawson made his suggestion, turned to Philip.

  “Oh gee, let’s go where there are girls,” he said. “Come to the Gaite

  Montparnasse, and we’ll get ginny.”

  “I’d rather go and see Cronshaw and keep sober,” laughed Philip.

  XLII

  There was a general disturbance. Flanagan and two or three more went on to the music-hall, while Philip walked slowly with Clutton and Lawson to the Closerie des Lilas.

  “You must go to the Gaite Montparnasse,” said Lawson to him. “It’s one of the loveliest things in Paris. I’m going to paint it one of these days.”

  Philip, influenced by Hayward, looked upon music-halls with scornful eyes, but he had reached Paris at a time when their artistic possibilities were just discovered. The peculiarities of lighting, the masses of dingy red and tarnished gold, the heaviness of the shadows and the decorative lines, offered a new theme; and half the studios in the Quarter contained sketches made in one or other of the local theatres. Men of letters, following in the painters’ wake, conspired suddenly to find artistic value in the turns; and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for their sense of character; fat female singers, who had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered to possess inimitable drollery; there were those who found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while others exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction of conjurers and trick-cyclists. The crowd too, under another influence, was become an object of sympathetic interest. With Hayward, Philip had disdained humanity in the mass; he adopted the attitude of one who wraps himself in solitariness and watches with disgust the antics of the vulgar; but Clutton and Lawson talked of the multitude with enthusiasm. They described the seething throng that filled the various fairs of Paris, the sea of faces, half seen in the glare of acetylene, half hidden in the darkness, and the blare of trumpets, the hooting of whistles, the hum of voices. What they said was new and strange to Philip. They told him about Cronshaw.

  “Have you ever read any of his work?”

  “No,” said Philip.

  “It came out in The Yellow Book.”

  They looked upon him, as painters often do writers, with contempt because he was a layman, with tolerance because he practised an art, and with awe because he used a medium in which themselves felt ill-at-ease.

  “He’s an extraordinary fellow. You’ll find him a bit disappointing at first, he only comes out at his best when he’s drunk.”

  “And the nuisance is,” added Clutton, “that it takes him a devil of a time to get drunk.”

  When they arrived at the cafe Lawson told Philip that they would have to go in. There was hardly a bite in the autumn air, but Cronshaw had a morbid fear of draughts and even in the warmest weather sat inside.

  “He knows everyone worth knowing,” Lawson explained. “He knew Pater and

  Oscar Wilde, and he knows Mallarme and all those fellows.”

  The object of their search sat in the most sheltered corner of the cafe, with his coat on and the collar turned up. He wore his hat pressed well down on his forehead so that he should avoid cold air. He was a big man, stout but not obese, with a round face, a small moustache, and little, rather stupid eyes. His head did not seem quite big enough for his body. It looked like a pea uneasily poised on an egg. He was playing dominoes with a Frenchman, and greeted the new-comers with a quiet smile; he did not speak, but as if to make room for them pushed away the little pile of saucers on the table which indicated the number of drinks he had already consumed. He nodded to Philip when he was introduced to him, and went on with the game. Philip’s knowledge of the language was small, but he knew enough to tell that Cronshaw, although he had lived in Paris for several years, spoke French execrably.

  At last he leaned back with a smile of triumph.

  “Je vous ai battu,” he said, with an abominable accent. “Garcong!”

  He called the waiter and turned to Philip.

  “Just out from England? See any cricket?”

  Philip was a little confused at the unexpected question.

  “Cronshaw knows the averages of every first-class cricketer for the last twenty years,” said Lawson, smiling.

  The Frenchman left them for friends at another table, and Cronshaw, with the lazy enunciation which was one of his peculiarities, began to discourse on the relative merits of Kent and Lancashire. He told them of the last test match he had seen and described the course of the game wicket by wicket.

  “That’s the only thing I miss in Paris,” he said, as
he finished the bock which the waiter had brought. “You don’t get any cricket.”

  Philip was disappointed, and Lawson, pardonably anxious to show off one of the celebrities of the Quarter, grew impatient. Cronshaw was taking his time to wake up that evening, though the saucers at his side indicated that he had at least made an honest attempt to get drunk. Clutton watched the scene with amusement. He fancied there was something of affectation in Cronshaw’s minute knowledge of cricket; he liked to tantalise people by talking to them of things that obviously bored them; Clutton threw in a question.

  “Have you seen Mallarme lately?”

  Cronshaw looked at him slowly, as if he were turning the inquiry over in his mind, and before he answered rapped on the marble table with one of the saucers.

  “Bring my bottle of whiskey,” he called out. He turned again to Philip. “I keep my own bottle of whiskey. I can’t afford to pay fifty centimes for every thimbleful.”

  The waiter brought the bottle, and Cronshaw held it up to the light.

  “They’ve been drinking it. Waiter, who’s been helping himself to my whiskey?”

  “Mais personne, Monsieur Cronshaw.”

  “I made a mark on it last night, and look at it.”

  “Monsieur made a mark, but he kept on drinking after that. At that rate

  Monsieur wastes his time in making marks.”

  The waiter was a jovial fellow and knew Cronshaw intimately. Cronshaw gazed at him.

  “If you give me your word of honour as a nobleman and a gentleman that nobody but I has been drinking my whiskey, I’ll accept your statement.”

  This remark, translated literally into the crudest French, sounded very funny, and the lady at the comptoir could not help laughing.

  “Il est impayable,” she murmured.

  Cronshaw, hearing her, turned a sheepish eye upon her; she was stout, matronly, and middle-aged; and solemnly kissed his hand to her. She shrugged her shoulders.