Thirty-six years! That goes a long way to redeem even three thousand pounds of all their cumulative vulgarity.
The Pitcher is now in the National Gallery, with that other canvas by the same hand, The Moon-Dial. There they hang together for all who care to see them, his first and his last—the blossom and the fruit.
He had not long to live himself, and it was his good-fortune, so rare among those whose work is destined to live forever, that he succeeded at his first go-off.
And his success was of the best and most flattering kind.
It began high up, where it should, among the masters of his own craft. But his fame filtered quickly down to those immediately beneath, and through these to wider circles. And there was quite enough of opposition and vilification and coarse abuse of him to clear it of any suspicion of cheapness or evanescence. What better antiseptic can there be than the philistine’s deep hate? What sweeter, fresher, wholesomer music than the sound of his voice when he doth so furiously rage?
Yes! That is “good production.” As Svengali would have said, “C’est un cri du cœur!”
And then, when popular acclaim brings the great dealers and the big cheques, up rises the printed howl of the duffer, the disappointed one, the “wounded thing with an angry cry”—the prosperous and happy bagman that should have been, who has given up all for art, and finds he can’t paint and make himself a name, after all, and never will, so falls to writing about those who can—and what writing!
To write in hissing dispraise of our more successful fellow-craftsman, and of those who admire him! that is not a clean or pretty trade. It seems, alas! an easy one, and it gives pleasure to so many. It does not even want good grammar. But it pays—well enough even to start and run a magazine with, instead of scholarship and taste and talent! humor, sense, wit, and wisdom! It is something like the purveying of pornographic pictures: some of us look at them and laugh, and even buy. To be a purchaser is bad enough; but to be the purveyor thereof—ugh!
A poor devil of a cracked soprano (are there such people still?) who has been turned out of the Pope’s choir because he can’t sing in tune, after all!—think of him yelling and squeaking his treble rage at Santley—Sims Reeves—Lablache!
Poor, lost, beardless nondescript! why not fly to other climes, where at least thou might’st hide from us thy woeful crack, and keep thy miserable secret to thyself! Are there no harems still left in Stamboul for the likes of thee to sweep and clean, no women’s beds to make and slops to empty, and doors and windows to bar—and tales to carry, and the pasha’s confidence and favor and protection to win? Even that is a better trade than pandering for hire to the basest instinct of all—the dirty pleasure we feel (some of us) in seeing mud and dead cats and rotten eggs flung at those we cannot but admire—and secretly envy!
All of which eloquence means that Little Billee was pitched into right and left, as well as overpraised. And it all rolled off him like water off a duck’s back, both praise and blame.
It was a happy summer for Mrs. Bagot, a sweet compensation for all the anguish of the winter that had gone before, with her two beloved children together under her wing, and all the world (for her) ringing with the praise of her boy, the apple of her eye, so providentially rescued from the very jaws of death, and from other dangers almost as terrible to her fiercely jealous maternal heart.
And his affection for her seemed to grow with his returning health; but, alas! he was never again to be quite the same lighthearted, innocent, expansive lad he had been before that fatal year spent in Paris.
One chapter of his life was closed, never to be reopened, never to be spoken of again by him to her, by her to him. She could neither forgive nor forget. She could but be silent.
Otherwise he was pleasant and sweet to live with, and everything was done to make his life at home as sweet and pleasant as a loving mother could—as could a most charming sister—and others’ sisters who were charming too, and much disposed to worship at the shrine of this young celebrity, who woke up one morning in their little village to find himself famous, and bore his blushing honors so meekly. And among them the vicar’s daughter, his sister’s friend and co-teacher at the Sunday-school, “a simple, pure, and pious maiden of gentle birth,” everything he once thought a young lady should be; and her name it was Alice, and she was sweet, and her hair was brown—as brown! …
And if he no longer found the simple country pleasures, the junketings and picnics, the garden-parties and innocent little musical evenings, quite so exciting as of old, he never showed it.
Indeed, there was much that he did not show, and that his mother and sister tried in vain to guess—many things.
And among them one thing that constantly preoccupied and distressed him—the numbness of his affections. He could be as easily demonstrative to his mother and sister as though nothing had ever happened to him—from the mere force of a sweet old habit—even more so, out of sheer gratitude and compunction.
But, alas! he felt that in his heart he could no longer care for them in the least!—nor for Taffy, nor the Laird, nor for himself; not even for Trilby, of whom he constantly thought, but without emotion; and of whose strange disappearance he had been told, and the story had been confirmed in all its details by Angèle Boisse, to whom he had written.
It was as though some part of his brain where his affections were seated had been
