Studio: international art (13.1898)

Charles Couriers Paintings on Silk

a postman, grows strawberries, works a ferry, but
you are at once informed that what he really is, is
the poet of the Deer, or of the Seals. So again, in
France, a very different feeling would seem to
prevail. It recently happened that an Englishman
was brought before a French Court for assaulting,
if I remember rightly, a baker. Things were going
badly for him, the judge's mind was black with
thoughts of Egypt and British perfidy, when the
defence sprung upon the Court twelve amiable
Frenchmen who testified that the accused was a
great English poet. . . . He left the court with
only that stain upon his character. Think of it as
a possible testimony to character in this country !
Why, his friends would have lied themselves hoarse
to assure the Court that he had never written a
line of verse, and had it come out in cross-examina-
tion, a jury would certainly have given weight to it
in awarding damages.

By people so stern to their own feelings, so shy
of the grace and vanity of life, it is improbable
that Conder's art should be very much liked. In a
more congenial time princesses would have fought
for his fans, since none more beautiful or fit were
ever made. They do get about: amateurs frame
them and hang them charily up ; but where are
the rooms, the palaces, he would have filled with
imagery in a gallanter time ? Never was an age
so diligently bent on the penances of art as ours :
every mournful mendicant gets his hearing; our
royal family spend their afternoons in Bond Street
" inspecting " (the only possible word) the sketches
that any dull itinerant has to show, but the pious
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chase is for ever on a false scent, and avoids joy
like a plague.

An art like this is often dismissed as " slight" by
people who do not understand that an amply
stuffed realism is only one stratagem for tricking
the imagination, and thus insist on the publication
of what is not even a pledge of good faith. Cer-
tainly on the face of it there is an air of injustice
in the fact that one man may fatten us with cir-
cumstance and make the heaviest deposits of
securities, yet never in this world of make-believe
get a penny of credit: the most guileless suspect a
confidence trick and will not trust him with their
watch round the corner; while another, on the
passage of a trifling coin, can open an unlimited
account and is free to handle our dearest posses-
sions. Sometimes this is desperately set down to
the wisdom of " leaving things to the imagina-
tion ;" but a left luggage office is not more
doggedly inert than imagination when treated in
that way. Some pledge must pass, though it
may be difficult for us to fix the manner and
terms of its passage, some assurance of good faith
or kindling instigation. In a moment the inert
poetic faculty is ranged as an accomplice, ready to
do half the work, to outrun the suggestion, to take
fire on a hint. This secret power is present in the
slightest of some men's work, absent from the most
laborious of others : the invitation given by the
first seems to set the course, trim the sails, and
command the wind; away goes the ship, and mere
nothings of corroboration—floating weed, a spar, a
bird—are proof effective of the continent the pilot