Here were crude colours indeed--almost, in many cases, as they came from the tubes, and as for drawing, there was hardly a trace of it, yet in the majority of the pictures there was a riotous freedom which rushed like a cleansing wind through Mendel's mind, and it seemed to him that here was the answer to many of his doubts--not a clear vision of art, but a roughly indicated road to it. It was absurd to sit cramping over rules and difficult technicalities when the starting-point of art lay so far beyond them. There was much rubbish in the show, but the works of Cézanne and Picasso were undeniably pictures. They were not flooded with a clear loveliness, like the pictures of Botticelli or Uccello, but they had beauty, and lured the mind on to seek another more mysterious beauty beyond them.
The two friends went through the exhibition in silence. As they left, Mendel asked:--
"We're snuffed out," replied Logan despondently.
"Not I!" cried Mendel. "I'm only just beginning."
"I don't understand it yet. It has made my eyes and my head ache. At first it seemed to me too cerebral to be art at all, but there's no denying it, and it has to be digested. In a way it is what I have always been talking about. It has to do with the life we are living, which may not be much of a life, but it is ours and we find it good. It has not been a plunge into another world, like a visit to the National Gallery, but into some reality a little beyond this extraordinary jumble and hotch-potch of metropolitan life."
"It is painting," said Mendel. "That is enough for me. And they are not afraid of colour. Why should they be? The colours are there: why not use them? I'm going to."
And he went home and dashed off a savage mother with a green face thrusting a straw-coloured breast into the gaping red lips of a child.
So much for maternity and the Madonnas! He knew how a man loved his mother, and it was not in that milky way, setting her above nature, she who was tied and bound to natural, instinctive, animal life. If a man loved his mother, it was because with her it was the easiest thing in the world to be intimate and frank and honest and without pretence of any kind.
His mother was marvellous to him because she was his dearest friend, not because she had given him suck. That was a fact like any other, and facts were not marvellous until more and more light was thrown on them from the mind, for in the murk and muddle of human life they were distorted.