THE POOR ARTIST.

Is

I AM a poor, alas in every sense of the word a poor artist. My friends, for I have never yet been sufficiently successful to acquire enemies, say so freely; and if not in my hearing, yet so that I can hear of it with abundant frequency. And indeed the prices which I can obtain for my work sufficiently prove that, whether my friends are correct in their estimate of my powers or not, they are on the side of the majority, which, as things go now, is as near to truth as most people trouble to get themselves. But I am a poor painter, and a painter much to be pitied, in a sense they hardly take into their account. Is it not a valid cause for pity to be for ever aiming at a mark you can never hit; to have a mistress so lovely that you cannot leave her, and so perfect that you know full-well you can never reach her;-to fail so completely to realise your own objects and to express your own meanings that the contempt of the world seems but a feeble and broken reflection of your own self-scorn? This is my lot, and it is a pitiable one surely. I see around me an infinite and immeasurable world of beauty, and the more clearly its beauty becomes apparent to me the more does it mock and tantalise my limping efforts to catch the simplest of its charms. it worth my while to describe how the fleeting mists elude my clumsy touch; how the clouds as they sail onward so silently, shift, and melt, and blend, and gather, till my closest copy of even their shape has to end in impudent guess-work? Need I tell how, when after a day of storm the setting sun reaching some rift in the flying cloud-rack, suddenly pours back to the very zenith one flood of molten gold and liquid ruby, I have to lay down my poor sham colours in despair? Why the very daisies mock me. Their simplicity is after all a star of virgin silver radiating from a boss of immaculate gold. I imitate them with little splashes of white paint diversified with dubious specks of yellow; and when I see the copy I have made, Heaven knows with utmost care,-I am a poor artist; and I fancy that so far we are all poor artists if we were to tell the truth, except some few who, having become persuaded that the beauty lies in them and not in nature, are quite happy and contented. Finally, I am poor in that very common and matter-of-fact sense which a well taught and philosophical mind would regard as a quite unimportant accident of humanity,-provided it only happened to other people; but which, not unnaturally, makes itself felt

the more keenly the closer it comes. For this misfortune my friends have been so good as to discover several causes, some of which their advice ought certainly to be able to remedy, since it was their imagination which created them. Other remedies I have taken pains to search out in the writings of the philosophers and moralists (so visionary and unpractical a being is an artist); but I have found none very applicable to my case. Sometimes a man is so free, or so healthy, or so inured to it, that he does not feel his poverty at all, and in this case a suit of philosophical contentment is cheap and easy wear; but when a man has given hostages to fortune in the shape of a wife and many little children, and has moreover been placed by providence in the midst of civilisation with all its exigencies, I am of opinion that for the disease of poverty he will find one only anodyne, sleep; and one only remedy, gold.

True to those personal reminiscences which are evidently in danger of becoming vulgar, and for which I can only apologise on the ground that they bring me to my story; destined to settle I hope for ever the point upon which my friends are always harping, namely, that I might have been well enough to do had I liked, but that the fault is my own. So it is, although not just in the way they are kind enough to imagine. I might have been rich; and if I am not so it is my own fault? Well, you shall judge.

I was sitting in my studio, idle enough and sad enough. It was scarcely dark, but the daylight by which alone a painter can work was waning, and there had come over me one of those fits of depression in which a man doubts whether it be any good to work at all. Just there, and just then, it was too true that I could turn my eyes no way but they must light on marks of failure and disappointment. The two canvasses which I had placed, with perhaps pardonable vanity, in the position where they would most readily strike the eye, had been accepted at the Academy, and had really been fairly well hung. But it is easier for an unknown man even to get two pictures accepted at the Royal Academy than to get them noticed when they are there. I might say something cutting perhaps, if I took time, about the fairness of the critics and the judgment of the public. To what purpose? No one had robbed me, no one abused me. Here are my pictures back again, safe and sound;-uninjured, uncriticised, and alas! unsold. There are a score more scattered about, they come from various provincial exhibitions, some from more than one. Trade has been very bad, and pictures are luxuries easily dispensed with; it is needless to work out the sum in twenty different ways when the result is always the same. There is the portrait too which Lady Giles Gotham so absolutely refused on account of the complexion not being that which, for aught I know, hers may have been twenty years ago. Her ladyship's complexion is too well-known to her friends to admit of much sophistication, and is assuredly none of my fault. What was I to do? To write her down a Hebe, and myself an ass, by the same falsehood; or to bow her ladyship out with moody politeness and turn back to wonder whether it had ever occurred to her that canvas and paints were not supplied to modern artists on the same terms as manna to the ancient Israelites ?

There were others, and there was the recollection of others still, sold perforce to dealers at prices which had led me to suppose that they imagined "plumber and glazier" to form also portions of my description in the directory. But there was nowhere, that I could see, turn myself as I would, any hope, any prospect of that appreciation to which the honest worker may lawfully aspire, any distant possibility of that fame of which he may innocently dream, nay, any expectation of deliverance from that carking care which while it aggravates the claims upon one's brain, minimises at the same time one's power to think. A dreary prospect-interrupted by a slight tap upon my studio door, and by the entrance of a stranger who, with a slight bow and some commonplace request, as I understood it, that I would not disturb myself, proceeded coolly to examine my far too extensive stock in hand. What between those who, having a will of their own, care nothing for appearances; and those who, having no will of their own, are all the more obliged to put on the appearance of one-picture buyers are proverbially eccentric. My visitor's brusque manners caused me therefore little surprise, but his proceedings might well have excited curiosity in one more busily occupied than I was at that moment. He had deprecated interference by a tacit motion of his hand, and I had full leisure for observation in my turn as he flitted from one to another of my luckless canvasses, now directing his attention apparently to the frame of such as were graced with frames, now scrutinising the signature, now turning a picture edgeways to the light as though his object had been to ascertain the thickness of the layers of paint; but never, never once, looking at a picture as a man would have looked who cared neither for names or processes, but who simply desired to find work sincerely meant and worthily executed. As for his face, that was rarely turned towards me, and so rapid and erratic were his movements that the few glimpses I obtained of it conveyed no impression beyond that of extreme littleness mingled with mediocre acuteness. He might have served for the very personification of a picture dealer who had gone into the business just as he might have gone into those of the Free-Thought Lecturer, Irish Home Ruler, or Electric Light Company Promoter; simply because for the moment it paid, or at all events brought notoriety-which is the means by which the astute initiated advertise gratis. Such a physiognomy was obviously too common to excite much attention, and although my strange visitor's dress was of an ultra-æstheticism which must have elicited free comment in the street, it was not remarkable in the studio of an artist, whose experience must long since have prepared him for anything and everything short of common honesty and common sense. Still it was really irritating to see even the most ordinary of mortals fluttering about like an insane artificial butterfly; and it is small blame I think to my overstrained courtesy if, when after an examination of my works at once protracted and flippant he at length turned towards me, I greeted my visitor with the abrupt enquiry

"What are you?"

"What am I?" said he complacently, and as though somewhat astonished that such a question should be put to him, "I am ART."

So unexpected an answer, I am free to confess, for the moment bewildered me.

"Art!" said I, "what art? the spirit of art?"

"I am Art," was the calm reply, "as for spirit, I must admit I don't know much about that, but anyway I am Modern Art. Why, don't you know me?" continued my friend, with a surprise apparently almost equal to my own.

"But, your dress!" I faintly rejoined, dimly conscious of a desire to choose, as in politeness bound, the least personal of the peculiarities which so shocked my nerves.

"Dress!" exclaimed my friend almost angrily, "What has dress to do with it? In France and Belgium I usually wear none at all,-would that please you better? But I did not come here to dispute, and indeed I know of nothing to dispute about. Such as I am, and unfortunate as I am not to meet with your approval, who do you suppose made me? You would scarcely suspect me of having dropped from Heaven, I imagine?" (which was so startlingly true that I had not a word to answer). "Who then made Art what it is in any age, except and here he ironically bowed, "except the artists? "

What could I say? I was speechless, as indeed becomes an unsuccessful man, for is not ill-success a plain proof of stupidity just as good success is of wisdom?

"I need not," said this strange avatar of art, "enquire in my turn You are an artist-and a poor one. Why?"

what
you are.

"I suppose," stammered I, "because I am not a good one." "Bah!" was the unceremonious and emphatic reply, "you have ability enough and to spare for twenty fortunes, but you do not know how to use it. Give me your color box and come with me."

I followed him unresistingly, and he led me straight to the portrait of Lady Giles Gotham.

"That," said he enquiringly "is"

"A dead failure," responded I promptly, "but who could have made a success of such a model, and how?"

"It is no failure," was the reply, "at least it is no failure in the sense in which you mean it; but it is an egregious blunder. Why, man alive, you have expended upon the background of that ridiculous picture an amount of labour, with which, judiciously distributed, I would undertake to fill the largest room in the Grosvenor Gallery. The original of the face is unknown to me, but the portrait strikes me as being one of those brutally exact likenesses which leave absolutely nothing to the imagination, and afford no more ground for æsthetic conversation than the reflection in a looking-glass. May I ask," continued my interlocutor with mock urbanity, "whether you are expecting a fortune to be left to you shortly, and whether you are

1

intending to devote your leisure in future to the depiction of moon-faced dowagers for your own private delectation ?"

I shook my head gloomily.

"To what purpose, then, tends work such as this, which after all your pains is not artistic, and with all your anxiety to please has offended the only human being who could ever possibly have been interested in it."

I scarcely know what I ventured to reply, I think it was something about the duty of adhering to Nature-but my visitor seemed so extremely annoyed by the allusion, and regarded me with so much contempt that I began to feel really afraid, and held my peace.

"Art," meanwhile, was so busy with my colors, of which he ruthlessly squeezed out upon my palette every tube which contained any approach to red, that silence seemed the safest form which my growing respect for my strange tutor could take. A liberal, and indeed lavish application of turps, oils, and megylp rapidly blended by a furious general onslaught with my largest palette knife, produced in a short time a streaky mass which contained a little of everything from madder to vermilion, and which-to my dismay--my visitor began to apply to, or rather to plaster over my work with a sort of demoniac ardour. "Oh hapless woman!" thought I, ruefully apostrophising to myself my offended patroness "was not that full-length canvas enough to spoil, and my lost time enough to waste; but you must needs absorb half the contents of my color-box!" But such reflections came too late. With more than earthly rapidity the work went on, the face was scumbled over into a mysterious vagueness through which the familiar features and rubicund cheeks of Lady Giles waned into the dim suggestion only of a likeness. A few heroic dabs and patches from the more glowing portions of the delectable mixture upon my palette, illuminated by smears of flake white squeezed straight from the tube and drawn into shape by the flattened end of the same, hinted at a crimson satin dress; and conveyed to the beholder at the same time the satisfaction which always attends the hitting upon the correct answer to a riddle. Dexterously intertwisted little hillocks of glowing crimson mingled with crude white, and flying touches of whatever came to hand, indicated the celebrated Gotham rubies with which her ladyship was wont to adorn herself upon the slightest provocation; and as for the background! Well, the simplest way of expressing the matter will be to say that the rest of the color went there. In what fashion, it would be vain and presumptuous on my part to pretend to express-nor, indeed, could I devise any competent form of description which would not occupy a longer time than did the operation itself. In brief, the daylight had not yet faded, before my visitor, posing himself in the calm attitude of a superior being who had accomplished a labour of beneficence, contemplated with evident satisfaction his finished work.

"There!" said he, "that is a Harmony in Pinks; or stay you are a comparatively unknown man and should have a less commonplace