CHAPTER XXII.—BLANCO SERENA.

Mr. Blanco Serena, the prophet of a new school of painting, the object of which was more closely to reconcile and blend the kindred arts of painting, poetry, and music, occupied a large detached house in South Kensington, whither his worshippers flocked every Sunday, as to the shrine of some patron saint. The walls were embellished with designs from his own pencil, or those of his own friends; the furniture was his own invention, in form as well as colour; the ceilings were cerulean, like the heavens, and like the heavens were studded with golden stars; so that when the rapt creature looked up in contemplation or in inspiration, his vision was rewarded by celestial glimpses. There were no carpets on the floors, but here and there costly rugs were strewn. The house formed a quadrangle, in the centre of which was an open court with a playing fountain, and by the fountain, in fine weather, the prophet and the faithful would lie upon tiger and lion skins, smoking pipes and calumets of strange device.

Serena himself was a middle-aged man, with a high, bald forehead, long apostolic beard, and large brown dreamy eyes. He was a good soul, with the kindest disposition, and the affectations of his profession did not extend to his personal character. The fault lay more in his stars than himself that he had become an eccentric painter. He began merrily, in Bohemian fashion, with a clay pipe in his mouth, painting real landscapes from nature and human beings from the life, and producing compositions noteworthy for fine colour and honest effect. But he discovered early, as many another prophet has discovered, that it did not pay. In an angry moment, one day, disgusted with a picture which he had just completed, he took up his brush and deliberately reversed all the colours of his composition. Where water was blue, he made it vermilion; where boughs were green and golden, he made them purple and cerulean; a white human figure standing by water became an Ethiop, through excess of shadow; and finally, out of sheer devilry, he covered the daffodil sky with layers of pea-green cloud. He had just completed his work, and was scowling at it grimly, when there entered Ponto, the new art critic from Camford. No sooner did Ponto see the mutilated picture than he clasped his hands and raised his eyes rapturously to heaven. ‘At last!’ he cried, and wrung Serena by the hand. ‘Only paint like this, and your fame is sure.’ The ‘Megatherium’ of the following Saturday contained an article by Ponto, entitled, ‘Mr. Blanco Serena’s new painting—a Reverie in Vermilion and Pea-green,’ in which article it was clearly demonstrated, not merely that the painting was one of the masterpieces of the world, but that the painter was the first ‘modern man’ who had dared ‘to give prominence on canvas to evanescent cosmic moods.’ From that day forth the epithets cosmic, august, titanic, supersensuous, sublime, and other adjectives of equal meaning were the especial property of Serena and his imitators; for that imitators came soon goes perhaps without saying, seeing that imitation is so easy. ‘Reveries’ on canvas became the rage; to be non-natural was the fashion. Artists who had once in their innocence strained every nerve to study great models and to copy nature, now tortured ingenuity to represent ‘evanescent cosmic moods’—out of colour, out of drawing, and out of all harmony with anything but the diseased invention of bad painters and the bad critics who urged them on.

Serena, as we have said, was a good fellow, and took his success sensibly. Only to one man in the world did he secretly confess the facts of the case. ‘I know I am a humbug,’ he said to Forster, ‘and that those who praise me are humbugs. I know that I paint worse than I did at twenty, and that, when I die, and my school dies with me, posterity will find me out. This is why, now and then, I follow the true lights of my soul, and paint a true picture; just to keep my work from utterly perishing in Limbo, just to enable some poor soul in the far future to say, “After all, Blanco Serena might, had he chosen, have escaped from being the ?sthetic Prig of his period.” But what I am the scribblers and the public have made me. If another man painted a bony woman in yellow gauze, with red hair and pale green eyes, and impossible arms and legs, he would be found out directly: but only let me paint such a figure, and call it “Persephone musing by the waters of Lethe,” or “Memory kneeling by the grave of Hope,” or “Fading away: a Sonata in Sunset tints,” and I am sure at least of Ponto’s praise and the public approval. Well, of all humbugs Art humbug is the worst, though, after all, worse saints have been canonised than Blanco Serena.’

To the studio of Serena, a few days after Madeline’s visit, came Ponto, the art critic, bringing with him a thin, middle-aged. Frenchman, with a coarse mouth and a sinister expression of countenance. The painter, with deft and careless hand, was adding a few touches to the picture of Ophelia.

‘Serena,’ cried Ponto, ‘let me introduce you to M. Auguste de Gavrolles, from Paris—the friend and pupil of the supreme and impeccable Gautier. He is a poet, an ardent worshipper of your genius, and in all matters of art completely sane a cosmic.’

Serena smiled and held out his hand, which the Frenchman took rapturously, and raised it to his lips.

‘Ah, Monsieur,’ he exclaimed, ‘this is the proudest moment of my life!’

Ponto threw himself into a chair, and looked around him with a smile of feline insipidity.

‘What’s that you have there, my dear Serena?’ he asked, blinking at the picture. ‘Ah, I see, another superbly musical meditation in the minor key of flake white!’

‘It is a portrait,’ said Serena, quietly.

‘An ideal portrait—quite so. How wonderfully in that floating drapery you have conveyed the serene insouciance of trances of languor crescending into aberration of supersensual dream!’

‘It is neither more nor less than a careful likeness of the original,’ returned Serena, modestly. ‘In the arrangement of the colours I wish to convey——’

‘The spirituality of a superb and life-consuming dream, fired with the arid flame of incipient passion—ethereal, almost epicene—conscious of throbbing vistas of asexual retrospection and chromatic wastes of fruitless future fantasy, interspersed with forlorn gulfs of irremediable darkness and despair. Added to this, and seen in the pose of the limp hand and the melancholy texture of the flesh tints, is the Lethean consciousness of a drowned and devastated ideal, unlightened by one star of promise and irredeemed by one flower of celestial ruth. Am I right? Do I take your meaning?’

‘Just so,’ said Serena, dryly, and turned to look at the Frenchman.

The latter, with shoulders elevated, and pince-nez in position, was gazing eagerly at the portrait. He now turned with a bow to Serena.

‘A portrait, did you say, Monsieur?’

‘Yes.’

‘May I ask of whom?’

‘Of the new actress, Miss Diana Vere.’

‘It is curious,’ said Gavrolles; ‘but pardon, the face seems familiar to me. I have seen it somewhere before.’

‘Indeed! Well, such a face, once seen, is not likely to be forgotten.’

‘Is it not beautiful!’ cried the Frenchman, with elevated shoulders and extended hands; ‘and seen upon your canvas, how sublime! How shall I express to you—to you, great artist, great genius, what at this moment I feel? But tell me, Monsieur, this—is she a friend of yours? No? Yes?’

41 know her slightly, that is all.’

‘What would I not give to see her, to have the honour of her acquaintance!’

‘If you wish to see her,’ said Serena, ‘you have only to go to the Parthenon Theatre, where she appears nightly.’

‘I will go; but stay, I return this night to Paris—but I shall return, and then, perhaps, you will introduce me?’ Serena shook his head.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he answered. ‘The lady sees no one, and is quite a recluse. What is still more peculiar is the fact that she has a particular aversion to gentlemen of your nation—to France and to Frenchmen without exception.’

‘You amaze me, Monsieur! Ah, this insular prejudice, how bête! But perhaps she has reason—perhaps she has lived in my country.’

‘Can’t say,’ returned Serena, as if tired of the subject; and he commenced again to work at the picture.

Ponto looked over his shoulder as he worked with admiring eyes.

‘You must know Gavrolles better,’ he observed; ‘I like him; we all like him. He is a man of ideas.’

Gavrolles placed his hand upon his heart and bowed.

‘I have learned of my master, the immortal Théophile, to worship what is beautiful, to adore what is superb.’

‘In France, at the present moment,’ continued Ponto, patronisingly, ‘Gavrolles represents the school of supersensuous personal yearning. In his last book of poems, “Parfums de la Chair,” and particularly in that superb fragment, “Cameo Satanique,” he has supplied the connecting link between the celestial appetite of Gautier and the divine nausea of Baudelaire. Till Gavrolles came, the calendar of imperial passion was incomplete. What Smith, Jones, and Keats are to our august poetry, that is he to the poetry of modern France.’

‘Ah, Monsieur, forbear!’ cried the Frenchman. ‘You overwhelm me with shame. Such praise—before the master!’

‘I will go further,’ cried Ponto, recklessly, ‘and I will fearlessly assert, that in the golden roll of the fearless and fecund Parisian Parnassus, there is no more affluent name than that of my friend Gavrolles. His “Chant Aromatique” to the Venus of Dahomey would alone entitle him to a place in that Pantheon where the names of Victor Hugo and Achille de Ganville shine effulgent, while his masterly management of the Sestina, in his great address to myself, is only to be compared with the Titanic sculpture cf Michael Angelo, or the colossal imagery of Potts.’

Serena smiled gloomily. He was familiar with that sort of praise, as addressed to himself, but, with all his cynicism, he scarcely approved of its lavish application to an obscure Frenchman. The fact was, that the whole speech formed part and parcel of an eulogistic article, in Ponto’s best manner, then in type for the ‘Megatherium,’ a widely circulated literary journal in which nepotism and malignity formed equal parts.

‘By the way,’ observed Serena, still quietly at work, ‘I see that MacAlpine has been falling foul of our friend Potts in the “North British.”’

MacAlpine was a cantankerous critic, hailing from beyond the Border, and with a Highland disregard of consequences in the expression of his literary opinions. Ponto turned livid.

‘MacAlpine,’ he exclaims, ‘bears to the immortal Potts the relation that a leper does to Paian Apollo. It is well known that MacAlpine has been guilty of murder, bigamy, rapine, incest, and larceny, but all these are nothing compared to his fiendish and futile statement that Potts is not the most stupendous, wonderful, awe-inspiring, celestial, and cosmic creature existing on this planet. Mac Alpine, it is notorious, left his grandmother to starve in the workhouse, and kicked his little brother to death, but these crimes are venial by the side of his hateful and hellish assertion that your divine and spirit-compelling picture of “Psyche watching the Sleep of Eros” is out of proportion.’

Serena sighed, then smiled.

‘Do you know, my dear Ponto, I sometimes think that a little hostile criticism is refreshing. I really find it so, when it comes in my way.’

Ponto shuddered.

‘The only true attitude of criticism is that of worship,’ he exclaimed. ‘The man who, in contemplating your consummate masterpiece, could be conscious of any feeling save of the surging forces of cosmic yearning, flowering into the form of perfect idealisation, and shining with the reflected light of coruscating eternities of sterile pain—such a man, I say, is capable of any social crime, and incapable of any aesthetic perception.’

‘Pardon me,’ returned Serena. ‘What you say is doubtless very flattering, but if criticism is pure worship, how do you account for your own attacks on the literary productions of the enemies of the aesthetic school?’

‘All modern schools but one are execrable,’ returned Ponto, with a grinding of the teeth and a waving of the hand. ‘It is enough for us to pronounce that they are not—Art! In approaching them we do not criticise—we simply obliterate; we crush, as we crush a reptile or an unclean thing. The man who denies absolute perfection to Potts, or universal mastery to Blanco Serena, at once proclaims, not merely his incompetence to speak on any artistic subject whatever, but by inference his moral degradation as a human being. We wave him from our vision—we wipe him out. He is a loathsome Philistine, an outcast, physically and intellectually abominable. Such a man once said, in my hearing, that “Mademoiselle de Maupin” was not the purest, wholesomest, most supremely sane and salutary book produced since the Divine Comedy, and that, on the whole, he preferred Wordsworth to Gautier as a moral teacher. My whole soul revolted. I shrank from that man with a shudder, and I am convinced that the wretch is ethically lost and intellectually paralytic.’

The Frenchman shook his head dolefully, as over some sad chronicle of human wickedness or sorrow. Serena laughed and turned with twinkling eyes to the excited critic.

‘Confess between ourselves that “Mademoiselle de Maupin” is not virile. For my own part, I never read it without feeling as if I had been slobbered over by a dirty baby.’

‘For God’s sake, Serena,’ cried Ponto, ‘don’t talk like that. I know you don’t mean it, but the very expression is worthy that infernal scoundrel MacAlpine. Not virile? Certainly not, and Heaven forbid! Virility, dear master, is coarseness, ugliness, rudeness, and hideousness. Is a rose-leaf virile? Are sweet shawms, exquisite scents, forlorn pulsations, and cadences of sexless and impotent desire, are these virile? The book of which we speak has been exquisitely called by a contemporary the Golden Book of spirit and sense; nay more, “The Holy Writ of Beauty!” In every page of it we feel the swooning consciousness, the stinging and slaying scourge, of fruitless and rootless passion, and the divine dew of incommunicable and luminous lust watering the spent fibres of a parched and palpitating aesthetic dream. We feel more! We feel that in realising this swoon of sensuous yet despairing pain, sharp as tears, bitter as brine, and sinuous as the serpent, and in falling back like a fountain to the ground from the heaven of eternally unsatisfied longing and delight, we penetrate to the central mystery of life, and see the white heart of the great rose of being pulsating with one melodious throb of self-satiating and non-virile bliss!’

Serena yawned, for he had heard all this before, and he was not particularly interested. As for the Frenchman, he listened and applauded, with many shrugs and smiles, but there was a lurking expression in his cat-like eye which showed that he was not altogether blind to the absurdity of the fatuous Ponto.

It is not our intention further to place on record the lucubrations of this typical critic of the period. The reader is doubtless familiar with the kind of criticism of which he and such as he are the mouthpieces. It has, perhaps, one redeeming merit—that of earnestness and thoroughness—and even its characteristic nepotism should not blind us to the fact that it reveals the existence of a real aspiration.

Arm-in-arm, Ponto and Gavrolles presently sallied forth, leaving Serena to enjoy his quiet meerschaum alone. As they went, the Frenchman was loud in praise of the painter, of his mighty genius and unassuming ways.

‘But this “Ophelia” whom he has painted,’ he cried presently, ‘is she so fair as that?’

Ponto confessed that he seldom went to the theatre, and he had not seen the original.

‘Ah, I am interested much,’ cried the other. ‘I must see her, I must know her, when I return to London.’

They hailed a hansom and got into it together. As they drove along the crowded streets in eager conversation, a young man, passing along on foot, glanced at their faces, started, and gazed eagerly at Gavrolles. The gaze only occupied a moment, then the vehicle was gone.

The young man was Edgar Sutherland, strolling along to his club.

‘That face!’ he muttered to himself, standing and looking after the hansom. ‘Where have I seen it before? Is it possible? Good heavens, now I remember! Can it be indeed the same?’

Lost in thought, with set lips and knitted brow, he walked on to his destination.