Old Welby, R.A., lived in No. 375 Fitzroy Square. He had lived there or thereabouts all his life; but his immediate dwelling-place was one which he had not occupied for above a year or two, and to which he had come out of charitable, friendly motives which he would have denied reluctantly had he been accused of them. It was poor Severn’s house, and Severn’s widow never would have been able to keep it but for old Welby, who had suddenly become dissatisfied with his rooms, and discovered that the ground-floor of 375 was the very thing he wanted. The old gentleman was very well off and very famous; but he was a bachelor, and had never aspired to the honour and worry of a house of his own. He was a thorough painter, steeped to the lips in that theory of life which is more destructive of social follies and more wedded to liberty than any other. Of all things in this world there was nothing he cared so much for as art. He loved the artist and the artist hand wherever he met with them, though{233} he did not always display his feeling. Mere intelligence, even, when it was bright and genuine, the uncultivated eye that perceived an effect, though in utter ignorance of its why or wherefore, pleased him; but he was very little interested in fine people, or about enthusiasts who would come and rave to him of his lovely pictures. ‘And had never found out the meaning of one of them, sir,’ he would say with a little snort of indignation. He had had his day of society, and had been much petted as an original as well as a great painter, but had borne his distinction very soberly, with a head it proved impossible to turn; and now having surmounted that ordeal, he lived as he liked living, seeing such people as he liked, going out when he pleased, dining when he pleased, dressing according to his own taste, with an utter disregard of anybody’s opinions. He had taken to Laurie as he seldom took to young men, and it was of him that our amateur went to seek counsel,—one of the most foolish things, had Laurie but known it, that he ever did in his life.
The ground-floor of the mansion in Fitzroy Square consisted of the dining-room in the front, an immense dark room with sober-toned walls and great pictures in heavy old frames, which was Welby’s sitting-room. The room beyond, which opened into it by folding doors, was a bare, scantily-furnished ante-chamber, where strangers, and models, and Philistines in general, were sent to wait his pleasure: beyond that{234} again, with a separate passage of its own, was the studio, which was not a part of the original building, but had been added to it by one of the many artists who had inhabited the house. Still farther on, following the plan of the original dwelling-place, was Mr. Welby’s bedroom, which was not very large, and looked into the dingy, smoky London garden, with a few trees in it which made your fingers black when you touched them, but which, nevertheless, flourished and threw out their fresh leaves every spring as if they had been in the depths of the country. It was Forrester, Mr. Welby’s man, who was almost as great an authority on art as himself, who opened the door to Laurie with frank salutation, and showed him into the studio, where his master was. ‘Mr. Renton, sir, come to see you,’ he said with the pleasant confidence that he was making an agreeable announcement, and lingered a moment in the room to shake down the contents of a portfolio which bulged inharmoniously and wounded his sensitive eye. ‘I told you, sir, as them Albert Doorers you went and bought was too big for any of the books,’ he said with a gentle reproach. ‘Then go and order some bigger,’ retorted his master; and with this little episode Laurie’s salutations were broken. Mr. Welby was not at work. He was looking over some tiny little scraps of drawings which were worth a great deal more than their weight in gold, carefully examining a frayed edge here and there, mounting them with his own hands,{235} caressing them as if they had been his children. The studio was a great, solemn, stately place, not like Laurie’s little shed. There was a rich old mossy Turkish carpet on the floor, and wonderful pieces of old art-furniture worth a fortune in themselves. Two or three easels stood about, one bearing a picture, set there clearly for purposes of exhibition; and another honoured by a pure white square of canvas without a line upon it. The picture was not Welby’s own. He worked but little now-a-days, and that little only when the inspiration was upon him. It was by an old Italian master little known, who was the R.A.’s special pet and protégé. He had been pointing out its beauties to some bewildered visitors only that morning, who would much rather have seen a Welby, even in the most fragmentary condition, than the curious, quaint Angelichino which required a very profound artistic taste to understand. Nobody knew whether old Welby’s admiration for his pet master was genuine, or was his way of jeering at a partially educated amateur public. That and his pure white canvas were his favourite show-pieces, and these accordingly were the most prominent objects in the studio when Laurie went in. The painter himself was a little man with refined features, but many wrinkles; his eyes were very keen and bright under the shaggy mobile eyebrows with which he almost talked, and the colour on his cheek was as fresh as a winter apple. His hair was almost white, and so was his beard, but yet he{236} was not old. He had a black velvet bonnet on his white locks,—not a skull-cap, but a round bonnet such as the Dutch painters wear in their pictures,—and a velvet coat; and was not above adding,—it was apparent,—a skilful touch to the picturesqueness of his appearance by means of dress. Such was the man who held out both his hands to Laurie, with a half foreign warmth mingled with his English calm. ‘Ah, Renton, I am glad to see you,’ he said; ‘a young fellow like you in September is a rarity: and I wanted some one to look at my little Titians. I picked them up in Venice for an old song. There is where you boys should go. Such lights, such reflexions! Look here, my dear fellow,—what do you say to that?’
Laurie gazed and applauded as was expected of him; but somehow, though he had been moderately cheerful before, the sight of this life which was no life filled him suddenly with an uncalled-for depression. To go wild about a scrap of paper with some pencilled lines made how many hundred years ago, and never to think of the lives getting wrecked, the hearts getting broken round you! This was what Laurie suddenly thought,—with great injustice, as was natural,—and felt disposed to walk away again on the spot without betraying the troubles of which the other was unconscious. ‘The padrona would have known before I had said a word,’ he said to himself in his heart.
Whether Mr. Welby, whose eye was keen enough, whatever his sympathy might be, read his young{237} friend’s thoughts at once it would be impossible to tell. If he did he showed no feeling for them. He went on calmly to the end of his new acquisitions, pointing out their beauties; and then when Laurie was sick and faint, and felt that he hated Titian, put them all together in a most leisurely way and locked them up in a drawer of a beautiful ebony cabinet all inlaid with silver. Then he returned to his visitor and drew a chair to a table and pointed to one near him. ‘Come and tell me all about it,’ he said with the most sudden change in his tone.
‘Ah, you have heard!’ cried Laurie, half indignant, half mollified.
‘I have heard nothing,’ said the painter; ‘but I see you have brought a heap of troubles to cast down at your neighbour’s door. Come, let us have them out.’ Whereupon poor Laurie told his story, brightening as he told it. Curiously enough, when he brought himself face to face with his misfortunes, the burden of them always was lightened for him,—a case so much unlike what it is with ordinary men. When he stood at a distance from them, so to speak, they swelled into great mystic, devouring giants; but they were only manageable human difficulties, and no more, when he faced them near. ‘I must take to work in earnest,’ said Laurie, ‘that’s all, so far as I am concerned. It is worse for Ben; but fortunately, as I have a profession——’
‘Have you a profession?’ Mr. Welby broke in{238} abruptly, looking Laurie, without a shadow of a smile, in the face, as if moved by genuine curiosity; and the young man gave a little nervous smile.
‘You thought I was amateur all over,’ he said, ‘and I daresay I deserved it. But don’t tear me to pieces altogether; that stage of existence is past.’
‘I asked for simple information,’ said the R.A. ‘If you have a profession now is the time to stick to it. I thought you were only a virtuoso; but if you have really been brought up to anything——’
‘You make me feel very small,’ said poor Laurie, blushing like a girl up to his hair. ‘I have not been brought up to it, I know. I have been a virtuoso merely, but I am not too old to begin to work in earnest. And there is nothing I love like art.’
‘Art!’ said Mr. Welby, with great strain and commotion of his eyebrows. He gave his shoulders a little shrug, and he talked volumes with those shaggy brows. Laurie felt himself scolded, pushed aside as a puny pretender.
‘I did not mean to say anything so very presumptuous,’ he said with momentary youthful petulance, in answer to this silent lecture; and then added, with equally sudden youthful compunction, ‘I beg your pardon. I do want your advice.’
‘Art!’ repeated the R.A. with a little snort. ‘You had much better take to a crossing at once. I went at it, sir, when I was twelve years old. I never had a thought in my noddle but pictures. I’ve gone{239} here and there and everywhere to study my trade; and after fifty years of it, sir,’ cried the Academician, springing suddenly to his feet, seizing a canvas which stood against the wall and thrusting it upon one of the vacant easels up to Laurie,—‘look at that!’
It was the beginning of a sketch half smeared over. One exquisite pair of eyes, looking out as from a mist of vague colour, seemed to look reproachfully upon their creator; but there certainly was an arm and leg also visible, of which Laurie felt like poor Andrea in Mr. Browning’s wonderful poem, that if he had a piece of chalk——. Welby, R.A. was growing old. He knew it perfectly, and perhaps in his soul was not sorry; but when he saw the signs of it on his canvas it went to his heart.
‘Look at that!’ he said, with a sort of savage triumph; ‘drawing any lad in the Academy would be ashamed of!—after fifty years as hard work as ever man had. I might have been Lord Chancellor in those fifty years. I might have sat on the wool-sack or been Governor of India; and here I stand, a British painter, not able to draw the tibia! By Jove, sir, a man would need to be trained to bear mortification before he could stand that!’
‘I should think you might laugh at it if any man could,’ said Laurie, feeling half disposed to laugh himself; but he had too true an eye to attempt to contradict his master.{240}
‘I can’t laugh at failure,’ said Mr. Welby, snatching the sketch he had just exhibited off the easel and thrusting it back into its place against the wall. ‘I had some people here to-day who would have given me a heap of money for that piece of idiocy. What do they care? It would have been a Welby, no matter what else it was. Welby in his drivelling stage, the critics would have called it, and just as good for a specimen of the master as any other. And that is what a man comes to, my dear fellow, after fifty years—of art!’
‘Yes,’ said Laurie, with the confidence which he had as a young man of the world, and not as an art student; ‘I don’t say anything about the tibia, for you know best; but to put a soul into a smeared bit of canvas is what no Lord Chancellor in the world could do; and you know quite well it would have made any young fellow’s fortune to have painted that pair of eyes.’
‘Eyes! Stuff!’ said the R.A., but he took back the canvas again and looked at it with a softened expression. ‘The short and long of it is, my dear boy,’ he said, ‘that Art is a hard mistress even to those who serve her all their lives; and you have done no more than flirt with her yet. Is there anything else open to you? You were quite right to come to me for advice. Nobody knows better the shipwrecks that have been made by art. Why, you cannot come into this house, sir, without feeling what an uncertain{241} syren she is. There was poor Severn, as good a fellow as ever breathed. I don’t say he could ever have been Lord Chancellor; but he might have made a very respectable attorney, perhaps, or merchant, or shoemaker, or something; and here he’s gone and died, the fool, at forty, leaving all those children, and not a penny, all along of art.’
‘But what do you say of the padrona?’ said Laurie, kindling into a little subdued enthusiasm. ‘What else could she have done? What would have become of the children?’
‘They would have gone to the workhouse, sir, and there would have been an end,’ said the Academician, sternly. ‘The padrona, as you call her—and, by Jove! had I been Severn, I’d have shut her up sooner than let a parcel of young fellows talk of her like that. Well, then, Mrs. Severn—as we’ll call her, if you please—the young woman has a pretty talent, and her husband taught her after a fashion how to use it. And her pictures sell—at present. But how long do you think it will be before everybody is stocked with those pretty groups of children? They’re very pretty, I don’t deny; and sometimes there’s just a touch that shows, if she had time, if she had not to work for daily bread, if she wasn’t a woman, and could be properly educated, why that she might do something with it which——. But everything is against her, poor soul! and she’s not wise enough to make hay while the sun shines;{242} and when the sun has done shining, I wish you would tell me what the poor thing is to do?’
‘I hope the sun will shine as long as she needs it,’ said Laurie, warmly.
‘Ah! hope, I dare say; so do I. But that’s as much as wishing she may die early, like him,’ said Mr. Welby, rubbing his eyelid. ‘It can’t last, my dear fellow; and that’s why I say the workhouse at once, and have done with it. But anyhow. Mrs. Severn is no example for you. She was made for work, that woman. As long as she has her baby to carry about at nights, and her boys to make a row, and that child Alice, with her curls—why the woman is a tiger for work, I tell you. But you are made of different matter. And besides,’ said the R.A., with the faintest twist of a smile about his lip, ‘a woman may content herself with the homely sort of work she can do; but a young fellow aims at high art—or he’s a muff if he don’t.’ The old man concluded with a little half-affectionate fierceness, softening towards Laurie, who was everybody’s favourite, and who was thus affronted, stimulated, and solaced in a breath.
‘Perhaps I am a muff,’ said Laurie, laughing. ‘I am inclined to think so, sometimes. I am not sure that I want to go in for high art. I want to master my profession as a profession, as I might go and eat in the Temple. I am not too old for that,’ he said, wistfully, giving his adviser one of those half-{243}feminine, appealing glances which never come amiss from young eyes.
Once more the R.A. became pantomimically eloquent. He shrugged his shoulders, he shook his head, he delivered whole volumes of remonstrance from his eyebrows. Then, after a few minutes of this mute animadversion, suddenly put his head between his hands, and stared right into Laurie’s eyes across the table. ‘Let us hear what chances you have otherwise,’ he said. ‘I beg your pardon for insinuating such a thing, but hasn’t your family some sort of connexion with—trade?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Laurie. ‘You need not beg my pardon. It is too big a connexion to be ashamed of—Renton, Westbury, and Co., at Calcutta, and there’s a house in Liverpool, I believe. Ben ought to have been sent out, had we stuck to the traditions of the family. It has been in existence for a hundred and fifty years.’
‘Well, then, suppose you go out in place of Ben,’ said Mr. Welby, musingly, as he might have asked him to take physic; upon which Laurie laughed, and grew rather red.
‘My cousin, Dick Westbury, went in Ben’s place,’ he said;—‘the very sort of fellow to make a merchant of. You might as well tell me to go and stand on my head.’
‘If I could make all the money by it that those fellows do, I should not mind standing on my{244} head,’ said Laurie’s counsellor, reprovingly. ‘Why shouldn’t you be “the very sort” as well? I don’t see that any particular talent is required. A good head, sir, and close attention, and a knowledge of the multiplication-table. But perhaps they did not teach you that at Eton?’ Mr. Welby added, with a gentle sneer, such as he loved.
‘If they did, I have forgotten it years ago,’ said Laurie. ‘Indeed it would not do. You know it would not do. A fellow has to be brought up to it; and besides, I shouldn’t go if I were asked,’ he added, with a sudden cloud on his face.
‘That settles the question,’ said his adviser. ‘You are a fool, my dear fellow; but I thought as much. Well, then, there are all the Government offices;—couldn’t your friends get you into one of them? The very thing for you, sir. Not too much to do, and plenty of time to do it in. You could keep up your studio still.’
‘But you forget the competitive examination,’ cried Laurie, just as his brother Ben had replied to a similar suggestion. ‘I don’t know Julius C?sar from Adam,’ he said, laughing. ‘I have not an idea which G?the it was that discovered printing. I can’t tell whereabouts are the Indian Isles. They’d pluck me as fast as look at me. You forget that we’re high-minded, and that influence is no good now.’
‘Confound it!’ said Mr. Welby, with energy,{245} pausing to find something else more feasible. Then he bent confidentially across the table, coaxing, almost appealing, to his intractable neophyte. ‘My dear fellow, what do you say to literature?’ said the R.A. in his softest tone. Upon which Laurie burst into uncontrollable laughter.
‘I see no occasion for laughter,’ the Academician continued, half offended. ‘Why shouldn’t you write as well as another? I assure you, sir, I know half-a-dozen men who write, and they have not an ounce of brains among them. All you require is the knack of it. They tell me they make heaps of money; and it does not matter what lies you tell, or how much idiocy you give vent to,—especially about art,’ he said, with sudden fierceness. ‘And, to be sure, in this beautiful age of ours everybody reads. I don’t see why you should not go in for the newspapers or the magazines, or something. There is no study wanted for that; there’s the beauty of it. The more nonsense you talk the more people like it. And so far as I can see, it’s as easy to talk nonsense on paper as in company; easier, indeed, for there’s nobody to contradict you. All you want is the knack. I know the editor of the “Sword,” my dear fellow. I’ll get you an engagement on that.’
‘But I never wrote two sentences in my life,’ said Laurie; ‘and, as for literature, it cannot be less uncertain than art.’
‘Quite a different thing, my dear fellow,’ said the{246} R.A., eagerly; ‘not one in fifty, let us say, knows a picture when he sees it. I might say one in a hundred. Whereas everybody, I suppose, understands the rubbish in the papers; everyone reads it, at least, which comes to the same thing. I know men who are making their thousands a-year. It is only getting the knack of it.’
Laurie gave a faint laugh; but the fun had by this palled upon him. For a moment he covered his face with his hands. It was part of his temperament to have these moments of impatience and disgust with everything. Then Mr. Welby got up and began to walk about the room in some excitement. ‘Confound the fellow, he will do nothing one tells him!’ he said. But after a while the old painter came back to his seat, and was very kind. He entered into the question, more gravely, even with a certain melancholy. He pointed out to him, again, how many wrecks there were on all the coasts, of men who had mistaken their profession, and gave him an impressive sketch of all the toils he ought to go through ere he could worthily bear the name of painter. ‘And, after all, find yourself like me, baffled by the tibia!’ he cried, with a kind of passion. But in this talk Laurie recovered his spirits. His friend, in his compunction, gave him practical advice which would have been of the highest importance to any beginner. ‘I warn you against it all the same,’ he said, working his eyebrows like the old-fashioned telegraph. But{247} Laurie took the information and the advice without the warning, and went away, once more seeing in a vision that picture on the line in the Academy with Laurence Renton’s name to it, and a crowd of his fine friends wondering around.