November 20
Still at home ill.
If anything, R⸺ is more of a précieux than I am myself. At the present moment he is tickling himself with the idea that he’s in love with a certain golden-haired damsel from the States. He reports to me fragments of his conversations with her, how he snatches a fearful joy by skirting dangerous conversational territory, or he takes a pencil and deftly outlines her profile or the rondeur of her bosom. Or he discourses at length on her nose or eye. I can well imagine him driving a woman crazy and then collecting her tears in a bottle as mementoes. Then whenever he requires a little heart stimulus he could take the phial from his waistcoat pocket and watch the tears condensing.
“Why don’t you marry her out of hand and be done with all this dalliance? I can tell you what’s the matter with you,” I growled, “you’re a landscape artist. … You’ll grow to resemble, that mean, Jewy, secretive, petty creature, J. W. M. Turner, and allow no human being to interfere with your art. A fine artist perhaps—but what a man! You’ll finish up with a Mrs. Danby.”
“Yes,” he answered, quoting Tennyson with great aptness, “and ‘lose my salvation for a sketch,’ like Romney deserting his wife. If I were not married I should have no wife to desert.”
It is useless to argue with him. His cosmogony is wrongly centred in Art not life. Life interests him—he can’t altogether resign himself to the cowl and the tonsured head, but he will not plunge. He insists on being a spectator, watching the maelstrom from the bank and remarking exquisitely, “Ah! there is a very fine sorrow,” or, “What an exquisite sensation.” The other day after one of our furious conversational bouts around this subject, I drew an insect, cut it out, and pinned the slip in a collecting box. Then suddenly producing the box, and opening it with a facetious grin, I said—
“Here is a jolly little sorrow I caught this morning.” The joke pleased him and we roared, bellowed.
“That terrible forefinger of yours,” he smiled.
“Like Cardinal Richelieu’s eyes—piercing?” I suggested with appreciation. (It is because I tap him on his shirt front in the space between waistcoat and tie aggressively for emphasis in conversation.)
“You must regard my passion for painting,” he began once more, “as a sort of dipsomania—I really can’t help myself.”
I jumped on him vehemently—
“Exactly, my pernickety friend; it’s something abnormal and unnatural. When, for purposes of self-culture, I see a man deliberately lop off great branches of himself so as to divert his strength into one limb, I know that if he is successful he’ll be something as vulgar as a fat woman at a country fair; and if he is unsuccessful he’ll be just a pathetic mutilation. … You are trying to pervert a natural instinct. You want to paint, I believe. Quite so. But when a boy reaches the age of puberty he does not grow a palette on his chin but hair. … Still, now you recognise it as a bad habit, why need I say more?” (“Why indeed?”) “It’s a vice, and I’m very sorry for you, old boy. I’ll do all I can—come and have some dinner with me tonight.”
“Oh! thank you very much,” says my gentleman, “but I’m not at all sorry for myself.”
“I thought as much. So that we are not so very much agreed after all. We’re not shaking hands after the boxing contest, but scowling at each other from the ropes and shaping for another round.”
“Your pulpit orations, my dear Barbellion, in full canonicals,” he reflected, “are worthy of a larger audience. … To find you of all people preaching. I thought you were philosopher enough to see the angle of everyone’s vision and broadminded so as to see every point of view. Besides, you are as afraid of marriage as I am, and for the same reasons.”
“I confess, when in the philosophic citadel of my own armchair,” I began, “I do see everyone’s point of view. You sit on the other side of the rug and put out the suggestion tentatively that murder may be a moral act. I examine your argument and am disposed to accept it. But when you slit up my brother’s abdomen before my eyes, I am sufficiently weak and human to punch you on the nose. … You are too cold and Olympian, up above the snowline with a box of paints.”
“It is very beautiful among the snows.”
“I suppose so.”
(Exit.)