“Yes, a great artist,” he agreed, “but not one of the greatest.” He spoke slowly, ruminatively, as though he were talking to himself. All his conversation was a dialogue with himself or that little Doppelgänger which stood invisibly to one side of the people he was supposed to be talking to; Burlap was unceasingly and exclusively self-conscious. “Not one of the greatest,” he repeated slowly. As it happened, he had just been writing an article about the subject matter of art for next week’s number of the Literary World. “Precisely because of that cynicism.” Should he quote himself? he wondered.
“How true that is!” Mrs. Betterton’s applause exploded, perhaps a little prematurely; her enthusiasm was always on the boil. She clasped her hands together. “How true!” She looked at Burlap’s averted face and thought it so spiritual, so beautiful in its way.
“How can a cynic be a great artist?” Burlap went on, having decided that he’d spout his own article at her and take the risk of her recognizing it in print next Thursday. And even if she did recognize it, that wouldn’t efface the personal impression he’d made by spouting it. “Though why you want to make an impression,” a mocking devil had put in, “unless it’s because she’s rich and useful, goodness knows!” The devil was pitchforked back to where he came from. “One has responsibilities,” an angel hastily explained. “The lamp mustn’t be hidden under a bushel. One must let it shine, especially on people of good will.” Mrs. Betterton was on the side of the angels; her loyalty should be confirmed. “A great artist,” he went on aloud, “is a man who synthesizes all experience. The cynic sets out by denying half the facts—the fact of the soul, the fact of ideals, the fact of God. And yet we’re aware of spiritual facts just as directly and indubitably as we’re aware of physical facts.”
“Of course, of course!” exclaimed Mrs. Betterton.
“It’s absurd to deny either class of facts.” “Absurd to deny me,” said the daemon, poking out his head into Burlap’s consciousness.
“Absurd!”
“The cynic confines himself to only half the world of possible experience. Less than half. For there are more spiritual than bodily experiences.”
“Infinitely more!”
“He may handle his limited subject matter very well. Bidlake, I grant you, does. Extraordinarily well. He has all the sheer ability of the most consummate artists. Or had, at any rate.”
“Had,” Mrs. Betterton sighed. “When I first knew him.” The implication was that it was her influence that had made him paint so well.
“But he’s always applied his powers to something small. What he synthesizes in his art was limited, comparatively unimportant.”
“That’s what I always told him,” said Mrs. Betterton, reinterpreting those youthful arguments about Pre-Raphaelitism in a new and, for her own reputation, favourable light. “Consider Burne-Jones, I used to say.” The memory of John Bidlake’s huge and Rabelaisian laughter reverberated in her ears. “Not that Burne-Jones was a particularly good painter,” she hastened to add. (“He painted,” John Bidlake had said—and how shocked she had been, how deeply offended!—“as though he had never seen a pair of buttocks in the whole of his life.”) “But his subjects were noble. If you had his dreams, I used to tell John Bidlake, if you had his ideals, you’d be a really great artist.”
Burlap nodded, smiling his agreement. Yes, she’s on the side of the angels, he was thinking; she needs encouraging. One has a responsibility. The daemon winked. There was something in his smile, Mrs. Betterton reflected, that reminded one of a Leonardo or a Sodoma—something mysterious, subtle, inward.
“Though, mind you,” he said regurgitating his article slowly, phrase by phrase, “the subject doesn’t make the work of art. Whittier and Longfellow were fairly stuffed with Great Thoughts. But what they wrote was very small poetry.”
“How true!”
“The only generalization one can risk is that the greatest works of art have had great subjects; and that works with small subjects, however accomplished, are never so good as …”
“There’s Walter,” said Mrs. Betterton, interrupting him. “Wandering like an unlaid ghost. Walter!”
At the sound of his name, Walter turned. The Betterton—good Lord! And Burlap! He assumed a smile. But Mrs. B. and his colleague on the Literary World were among the last people he wanted at this moment to see.
“We were just discussing greatness in art,” Mrs. Betterton explained. “Mr. Burlap was saying such profound things.”
She began to reproduce the profundities for Walter’s benefit.
He meanwhile was wondering why Burlap’s manner toward him had been so cold, so distant, shut, even hostile. That was the trouble with Burlap. You never knew where you stood with him. Either he loved you, or he hated. Life with him was a series of scenes—scenes of hostility or, even more trying in Walter’s estimation, scenes of affection. One way or the other, the emotion was always flowing. There were hardly any intervals of comfortably slack water. The tide was always running. Why was it running now toward hostility?
Mrs. Betterton went on with her exposition of the profundities. To Walter they sounded curiously like certain paragraphs in that article of Burlap’s, the proof of which he had only that morning been correcting for the printers. Reproduced—explosion after enthusiastic explosion—from Burlap’s spoken reproduction, the article did sound rather ridiculous. A light dawned. Could that be the reason? He looked at Burlap. His face was stony.
“I’m afraid I must go,” said Burlap abruptly, when Mrs. Betterton paused.
“But no,” she protested. “But why?”
He made an effort and smiled his Sodoma smile. “The world is too much with us,” he quoted mysteriously. He liked saying mysterious things, dropping them surprisingly into the middle of the conversation.
“But you’re not enough with us,” flattered Mrs. Betterton.
“It’s the crowd,” he explained. “After a time, I get into a panic. I feel they’re crushing my soul to death. I should begin to scream if I stayed.”
