There seemed a good deal of talk about a virulent article of comprehensive condemnation in the art columns of the _Saturday Spectator_; everybody seemed to have read it and nobody to have written it. For the rest, compliments crossed like smiling couples in the quadrille.
“What a stunning landscape that is of yours, Rapper!” said Wilfred Smith, a journalist so ignorant of painting that he was suspected of art criticism. “Quite like a Corot.”
“Oh, it’s nothing; just knocked off for a color-blind old Johnny who admires me,” replied Rapper, deprecatingly. He was a moon-faced man with a double eyeglass on a gold cord. “It’s rotten, really; I’m awfully ashamed of it.” And he elbowed his way towards it.
“So he ought to be, and so ought you to be ashamed, Wilfred,” said Morrison, the poet of pessimism and music-halls. “It’s just like those splashes of silvery gray they sell for Corots on the Boulevards.”
“That’s what I meant,” said Wilfred. “Didn’t you see I was guying him? Hullo, Clinch, I’ve been admiring that water-color of yours. What an exquisite face the girl has!”
“It isn’t a water-color, you ---- fool; it’s a pastel,” said Clinch, gruffly.
“That’s what I meant--not an oil-color,” replied Wilfred, unabashed.
Matt stared with interest at the picture, which was just beside him. The face was indeed exquisite with the peculiar delicacy of pastel. He looked at the painter’s own face, coarse and splotched, the teeth fouled by endless tobacco. It was as though Pan should paint Psyche.
“I see the _Saturday Spectator_ doesn’t understand your ‘Carolina,’ Clinch,” said the poet, smiling.
Clinch damned the _Saturday Spectator_ in a string of unlovely oaths, which were drowned by the music of a violin and a piano. He did not care a twopenny damn what people scribbled about him; his pictures were there, just the same.
“But what does ‘Carolina’ mean, old man?” said the poet, appealingly.
Clinch replied that literary fellows were invariably sanguinary fools who fancied that painting meant things and could be explained in words. He had just been reading about the significance of Leonardo’s backgrounds in some rotten book on the Renaissance. In reality those bits of landscape must have been put in and painted out a dozen times before Leonardo had struck the color-harmony he tried after. Morrison retorted, that if the art-critic could paint he would become a partisan, tied to his own talent. As it was, he could approach other men’s pictures without prejudice.