“But, honestly,” asked Tom, “does the contemplation of that give you any artistic pleasure? Do you try to do for your age what Phidias and Praxiteles did for theirs?”
“Certainly I do. I try to represent to people what their age is. I have no doubt that ancient Greeks were excessively nude and statuesque. We are not statuesque or nude. Apollo pursuing Daphne through the Vale of Tempe, through thickets where the nightingales sing! What does Apollo do now? He arranges to meet Daphne at Aix-les-Bains, where they have mud-baths, and drink rotten-egg water. She wears an accordion-pleated skirt, and he a check suit. In their more rural moments they sit in the hotel-garden. It really seems to me that this little Abomination here is fairly up to date.”
“Oh, it’s up to date enough!” said Tom. “But is that the best of what is characteristic of our age?”
“That doesn’t concern me,” said Manvers blandly; “worst will do as well. What I want is anything unmistakably up to date. Your gods and goddesses, of course, are more beautiful from an ideal point of view. By the way, that reminds me, I want to look at some of those early figures; the drapery is very suggestive. I am going to do a statuette of a nun who has once been--well, not a nun, and I want archaic folds; but if I produced them now, they would be nothing more than uninteresting survivals. And to produce an uninteresting survival seems to me a most deplorable waste of time.”
“Why don’t you make a statuette of a sewing-machine?” asked Tom savagely.
“Oh, do you think sewing-machines are really characteristic of the age?” said Manvers. “I don’t personally think they are, any more than Homocea is. Sewing-machines are only skin-deep. I wonder when you will be converted again--become an apostate, as you would say now. You really had great talent. Those statuettes of yours at the Ashdon Gallery are attracting a great deal of attention.”
“I wish I had thrown them into the fire before I sent them there!”
“Well, when you come round again, you will be glad you didn’t,” said Manvers consolingly.
Tom took a turn or two up and down the room.
“You don’t understand me a bit,” he said suddenly. “Because I think that the Parthenon frieze is more beautiful than women with high-heeled shoes, you think I’m an idealist. I am a realist, just as much as you are, only I want to produce what I think is most beautiful. A beautiful woman has much in common with Greek art--and you want to produce what men, who are brutes, will say is most lifelike. You work for brutes, or what I call brutes, and I don’t.”