Fenwick's Career. Mrs. Humphry Ward
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above in dim heights of cloud, and, below, cleft to the heart by one deep ghyll, whence the golden trees—in the glittering green of May—descended single or in groups, from shelf to shelf, till their separate brilliance was lost in the dense wood which girdled the white farmhouse.
The pleasure of which he was conscious in the purple of the mountain, the colour of the trees, and all that magic of light and shade which filled the valley—a pleasure involuntary, physical, automatic, depending on certain delicacies of nerve and brain—rose and persisted, while yet his mind was full of harassing and disagreeable thoughts.
Well, Phoebe might take her choice!—for they had come to the parting of the ways. Either a good painter, a man on the level of the best, trained and equipped as they, or something altogether different—foreman, a clerk, perhaps, in his uncle's upholstery business at Darlington, a ticket-collector on the line—anything! He could always earn his own living and Phoebe's. There was no fear of that. But if he was finally to be an artist, he would be a first-rate one. Let him only get more training; give him time and opportunity; and he would be as good as any one.
Morrison, plainly, had thought him a conceited ass. Well, let him!
What chance had he ever had of proving what was in him? As he hung over the gate smoking, he thought of his father and mother, and of his childhood in the little Kendal shop—the bookseller's shop which had been the source and means of his truest education.
Not that he had been a neglected child. Far from it. He remembered his gentle mother, troubled by his incessant drawing, by his growing determination to be an artist, by the constant effort as he grew to boyhood to keep the peace between him and his irritable old father. He remembered her death—and those pictorial effects in the white-sheeted room—effects of light and shadow—of flowers—of the grey head uplifted; he remembered also trying to realise them, stealthily, at night, in his own room, with chalk and paper—and then his passion with himself, and the torn drawing, and the tears, which, as it were, another self saw and approved.
Then came school-days. His father had sent him to an old endowed school at Penrith, that he might be away from home and under discipline. There he had received a plain commercial education, together with some Latin and Greek. His quick, restless mind had soaked it all in; nothing had been a trouble to him; though, as he well knew, he had done nothing supremely well. But Homer and Virgil had been unlocked for him; and in the school library he found Shakespeare and Chaucer, 'Morte d'Arthur' and 'Don Quixote,' fresh and endless material for his drawing, which never stopped. Drawing everywhere—on his books and slates, on doors and gate-posts, or on the whitewashed wall of the old Tudor school-room, where a hunt, drawn with a burned stick, and gloriously dominating the whole room, had provoked the indulgence, even the praise, of the headmaster.
And the old drawing-master!—a German—half blind, though he would never confess it—who dabbled in oil-painting, and let the boy watch his methods. How he would twirl his dirty brush round and dab down a lump of Prussian blue, imagining it to be sepia, hastily correcting it a moment afterwards with a lump of lake, and then say chuckling to himself: 'By Gode, dat is fine!—dat is very nearly a good purple. Fenwick, my boy, mark me—you vill not find a good purple no-vere! Some-vere—in de depths of Japanese art—dere is a good purple. Dat I believe. But not in Europe. Ve Europeans are all tam fools. But I vill not svear!—no!—you onderstand, Fenwick; you haf never heard me svear?' And then a round oath, smothered in a hasty fit of coughing. And once he had cut off part of the skirt of his Sunday coat, taking it in his blindness for an old one, to clean his palette with; and it was thought, by the boys, that it was the unseemly result of this rash act, as disclosed at church the following Sunday morning, which had led to the poor old man's dismissal.
But from him John had learnt a good deal about oil-painting—something too of anatomy—though more of this last from that old book—Albinus, was it?—that he had found in his father's stock. He could see himself lying on the floor—poring over the old plates, morning, noon, and night—then using a little lad, his father's apprentice, to examine him in what he had learnt—the two going about arm-in-arm—Backhouse asking the questions according to a paper drawn up by John—'How many heads to the deltoid?'—and so on—over and over again—and with what an eagerness, what an ardour!—till the brain was bursting and the hand quivering with new knowledge—and the power to use it. Then Leonardo's 'Art of Painting' and Reynolds's Discourses'—both discovered in the shop, and studied incessantly, till the boy of eighteen felt himself the peer of any Academician, and walked proudly down the Kendal streets, thinking of the half-finished paintings in his garret at home, and of the dreams, the conceptions, the ambitions of which that garret had already been the scene.
After that—some evil days! Quarrels with his father, refusals to be bound to the trade, to accept the shop as his whole future and inheritance—painful scenes with the old man, and with the customers who complained of the son's rudeness and inattention—attempts of relations to mediate between the two, and all the time his own burning belief in himself and passion to be free. And at last a time of truce, of conditions made and accepted—the opening of the new Art School—evenings of delightful study there—and, suddenly, out of the mists, Phoebe's brown eyes, and Phoebe's soft encouragement!
Yes, it was Phoebe, Phoebe herself who had determined his career; let her consider that, when he asked for sacrifices! But for the balm she had poured upon his sore ambitions—but for those long walks and talks, in which she had been to him first the mere recipient of his dreams and egotisms, and then—since she had the loveliest eyes, and a young wild charm—a creature to be hotly wooed and desired, he might never have found courage enough to seize upon his fate.
For her sake indeed he had dared it all. She had consoled and inspired him; but she had made the breach with his father final. When they met she was only a struggling teacher in Miss Mason's school, the daughter of a small farmer in the Vale of Keswick. Old Fenwick looked much higher for his son. So there was renewed battle at home, till at last a couple of portrait commissions from a big house near Kendal clinched the matter. A hurried marriage had been followed by the usual parental thunders. And now they had five years to look back upon, years of love and struggle and discontent. By turning his hand to many things, Fenwick had just managed to keep the wolf from the door. He had worked hard, but without much success; and what had been an ordinary good opinion of himself had stiffened into a bitter self-assertion. He knew very well that he was regarded as a conceited, quarrelsome fellow, and rather gloried in it. The world, he considered, had so far treated him ill; he would at any rate keep his individuality.
Phoebe, too, once so sweet, so docile, so receptive, had begun to be critical, to resist him now and then. He knew that in some ways he had disappointed her; and there was gall in the thought. As to the London plan, his word would no longer be enough. He would have to wrestle with and overcome her.
London!—the word chimed him from the past—threw wide the future. He moved on along the rough road, possessed by dreams. He had a vision of his first large picture; himself rubbing in the figures, life-size, or at work on the endless studies for every part—fellow-students coming to look, Academicians, buyers; he heard himself haranguing, plunging headlong into ideas and theories, holding his own with the best of 'the London chaps.' Between whiles, of course, there would be hack-work—illustration—portraits—anything to keep the pot boiling. And always, at the end of this vista, there was success—success great and tangible.
He was amused by his own self-confidence, and laughed as he walked.
But his mood never wavered.
He had the power—the gift. Nobody ever doubted that who saw him draw. And he had, besides, what so many men of his own class made shipwreck for want of—he had imagination—enough to show him what it is that makes the mere craftsman into the artist, enough to make him hunger night and day for knowledge, travel, experience. Thanks to his father's shop, he had read a great deal already; and with a little money, how he would buy books, how he would read them!—
And at the thought, fresh images, now in rushing troops, and now in solitary fantastic beauty, began to throng before the inward eye, along the rich background of the valley; images from poetry and legend, stored deep in a greedy fancy,