His passion they were still as he drew near fifty, and saw all things become commonplace. That is the saddest of thoughts—as we grow older the romance fades, and all things become commonplace.
Half our lives are spent in wishing for tomorrow, the other half in wishing for yesterday.
Wild flowers alone never become commonplace. The white wood-sorrel at the foot of the oak, the violet in the hedge of the vale, the thyme on the windswept downs, they were as fresh this year as last, as dear today as twenty years since, even dearer, for they grow now, as it were, in the earth we have made for them of our hopes, our prayers, our emotions, our thoughts.
Sketchbook upon sketchbook in Alere’s room was full of wild flowers, drawn as he had found them in the lanes and woods at Coombe Oaks—by the footpaths, by the lake and the lesser ponds, on the hills—as he had found them, not formed into an artificial design, not torn up by the roots, or cut and posed for the occasion—exactly as they were when his eye caught sight of them. A difficult thing to do, but Alere did it.
In printing engravings of flowers the illustrated magazines usually make one of two mistakes; either the flower is printed without any surroundings or background, and looks thin, quite without interest, however cleverly drawn, or else it is presented with a heavy black pall of ink which dabs it out altogether.
These flowers the Editor bought eagerly, and the little landscapes. From a stile, beside a rick, through a gap in a hedge, odd, unexpected places, Alere caught views of the lake, the vale, the wood, groups of trees, old houses, and got them in his magical way on a few square inches of paper. They were very valuable for book illustration. They were absolutely true to nature and fact.
XXVIII
Perhaps the reason Alere never took to colours was because of his inherent and unswerving truthfulness of character. Genuine to a degree, he could not make believe—could not deceive—could not masquerade in a dress-coat.
Now, most of the landscape-painting in vogue today is nature in a dress-coat.
In a whole saloon of water colours, in a whole Academy, or Grosvenor Gallery you shall hardly find three works that represent any real scene in the fields.
I have walked about the fields a good deal in my brief, fretful hour, yet I have never seen anything resembling the strange apparitions that are hung on these walls every spring. Apparitions—optical illusions, lit up with watery, greenish, ghastly, ghost-light—nothing like them on earth I swear, and I suspect not in Heaven or Hades.
Touched-up designs: a tree taken from one place, a brook from another, a house from another—and mixed to order, like a prescription by the chemist—xv grs. grass, 3 dr. stile, iiij grs. rustic bridge. Nature never plants—nature is no gardener—no design, no proportion in the fields.
Colours! Passing a gasworks perhaps you may have noticed that the surface of the water in the ditch by the roadside bears a greenish scum, a pale prismatic scum; this is the colour-box of modern landscape.
How horrible the fields would look if they wore such hues in reality as are accepted on canvas at the galleries! Imagine these canvas tints transferred to the sward, the woods, the hills, the streams, the sky! Dies irae, dies illae—it would, indeed, be an awful day, the Last Day of Doom, and we should need the curtain at Drury Lane drawn before our eyes to shut it out of sight.
There are some who can go near to paint dogs and horses, but a meadow of mowing grass, not one of them can paint that.
Many can draw nature—drawings are infinitely superior generally to the painting that follows; scarce one now paints real nature.
Alere could not squeeze his sketches into the dress-coat of sham colour for any sacred exhibition wall whatever.
One thing Alere never attempted to draw—a bird in flight. He recognized that it was impossible; his taste rejected every conventional attitude that has been used for the purpose; the descending pigeon, the Japanese skewered birds, the swallow skimming as heavily as a pillow. You cannot draw a bird in flight. Swallows are attempted oftenest, and done worst of all.
How can you draw life itself? What is life? you cannot even define it. The swallow’s wing has the motion of life—its tremble—its wonderful delicacy of vibration—the instant change—the slip of the air;—no man will ever be able to draw a flying swallow.
At the feet of this Gamaliel of Fleet Street, Amaryllis had sat much, from time to time, when the carpetbag was packed and Alere withdrew to his Baden-Baden—i.e., to Coombe Oaks and apple-bloom, singing finch, and wildflowers.
There were no “properties” in Alere’s room at his lodgings; no odd bits collected during his wanderings to come in useful some day as makeup, realistic rock work, as it were, in the picture. No gauntlets or breastplates, scraps of old iron; no Turkish guns or yataghans, no stags’ horns, china, or carvings to be copied some day into an illustration. No “properties.”
No studio effects. The plaster bust that strikes the key and tones the visitors’ mind to “Art,” the etchings, the wall or panel decorations, the sliding curtains, the easels in the corner, the great portfolios—the well-known “effects” were absent.
A plain room, not even with a north light, plain old furniture, but not very old—not ostensibly ancient, somewhere about 1790 say—and this inherited and not purchased; Flamma cared not one atom for furniture, itself, old or new; dusty books everywhere, under the table, on the mantelpiece, beside the coal scuttle; heaps on chairs, quartos on the sofa, crowds more in his bedroom, besides the two bookcases and drawers; odd books most of them, Cornelius Agrippa, Le Petit Albert, French illustrated works, editions of Faust, music, for Flamma was fond of his many-keyed flute.
Great people once now and then called and asked to
