Babylon. Volume 2. Allen Grant
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and who make exceedingly taking pictures – Esthers, and Cleopatras, and so forth, you know – are quite useless from the plastic point of view: their good looks depend too much upon colour and upon passing shades of expression, while sculpture of course demands that the features should be almost faultlessly perfect and regular in absolute repose.’
The colonel looked uneasy again, and pulled up his collar nervously. ‘Very fine occupation indeed, a sculptor’s,’ he edged in sideways. ‘Delightful faculty to be able to do the living marble and all that kind of thing; very delightful, really.’ The colonel was always equal to a transparent platitude upon every occasion, and contributed very little else to the general conversation at any time.
‘And so delightful, too, to hear an artist talk about his art,’ Gwen added with a touch of genuine enthusiasm. ‘Do you know, I think I should love to be a sculptor. I should love even to go about and see the studios, and watch the beautiful things growing under your hands. I should love to have my bust taken, just so as to get to know how you do it all. It must be so lovely to see the shape forming itself slowly out of a raw block of marble.’
‘Oh, you know, we don’t do it all in the marble, at first,’ Colin said quickly. ‘It’s rather dirty work, the first modelling. If you come into a sculptor’s studio when he’s working in the clay, you’ll find him all daubed over with bits of mud, just like a common labourer.’
‘How very unpleasant!’ said the colonel coldly. ‘Hardly seems the sort of profession fit for a gentleman – now does it?’
‘Oh, papa, how can you be so dreadful! Why, it’s just beautiful. I should love to see it all. I think in some ways sculpture’s the very finest and noblest art of all – finer and nobler even than painting.’
‘The Greeks thought so,’ Colin assented with quiet assurance; ‘and they say Michael Angelo thought so too. Perhaps I may be prejudiced, but I certainly think so myself. There’s a purity about sculpture which you don’t get about painting or any other alternative form of art. In painting you may admit what is ugly – sparingly, to be sure, but still you may admit it. In sculpture everything must be beautiful. Beauty of pure form, without the accidental aid of colour, is what we aim at. Every limb must be in perfect proportion, every feature in exquisite harmony. Any deformity, any weakness of outline, any mere ungracefulness, you see, militates against that perfection of shape to which sculpture entirely devotes itself. The coldness, hardness, and whiteness of marble make it appeal only to the highest taste; its rigorous self-abnegation in refusing the aid of colour gives it a special claim in the eyes of the purest and truest judges.’
‘Then you don’t like tinted statues?’ the colonel put it. (He knew his ground here, for had he not seen Gibson’s Venus?) ‘Neither do I. I always thought Gibson made a great mistake there.’
‘Gibson was a very great artist,’ Colin replied, curling his lip almost disdainfully, for he felt the absurdity of the colonel’s glibness in condemning the noblest of modern English sculptors off-hand in this easy, mock-critical fashion. ‘Gibson was a very great artist, but I think his Venus was perhaps a step in the wrong direction for all that. Its quite true that the Greeks tinted their statues – ’
‘Bless my soul, you don’t mean to say so! the colonel ejaculated parenthetically.
‘And modern practice was doubtless founded on the mistake of supposing that, because the torsos we dig up are white now, they were white originally. But even the example of the Greeks doesn’t settle every question without appeal. We’ve tried white marble, and found it succeed. We’ve tried tinting, and found it wanting. The fact is, you see, the attention of the eye can’t be distracted. Either it attends to form, or else it attends to colour; rarely and imperfectly to both together. Take a vase. If it’s covered with figures or flowers, our attention’s distracted from the general outline to the painted objects it encloses. If its colouring’s uniform, we think only of the beauty of form, because our attention isn’t distracted from it by conflicting sensations. That’s the long and the short of it, I think. Beauty of form’s a higher taste than beauty of colour – at least, so we sculptors always fancy.’
Colin delivered these remarks as if he intended them for the colonel (though they were really meant for Miss Gwen’s enlightenment), and the colonel was decidedly flattered by the cunning tribute to his tastes and interests thus delicately implied. But Gwen drank in every word the young man said with the deepest attention, and managed to make him go on with his subject till he had warmed to it thoroughly, and had launched out upon his own peculiar theories as to the purpose and function of his chosen art. All along, however, Colin pointed his remarks so cleverly at the colonel, while giving Gwen her fair share of the conversation, that the colonel quite forgot his first suspicions about the young sculptor, and grew gradually quite cordial and friendly in demeanour. So well did they get on together that, by the time they had had lunch out of the colonel’s basket, Colin had given the colonel his ideas as to the heinousness of palming off as sculpture veiled ladies and crying babies (both of which freaks of art, by the way, the colonel had hitherto vastly admired); while the colonel in return had imparted to Colin his famous stories of how he was once nearly killed by a tiger in a jungle at Boolundshuhr in the North-West Provinces, and how he had assisted to burn a fox out in a hunt at Gib., and how he had shot the biggest wapiti ever seen for twenty years in the neighbourhood of Ottawa. All which surprising adventures Colin received with the same sedulous show of polite interest that the colonel had extended in turn to his own talk about pictures and statues.
At last, they reached Dijon, and there Colin got out, as in duty bound, to inquire whether his master was in want of anything. Sir Henry didn’t need much, so Colin returned quickly to his own carriage.
‘You have a friend in a coupé-lit, I see,’ the colonel said, opening the door for the young stranger. ‘An invalid, I suppose.’ Colin blushed visibly, so that Miss Gwen noticed his colour, and wondered what on earth could be the meaning of it. Till that moment, to say the truth, he had been so absorbed in his talk about art, and in observing Gwen (who interested him as all beautiful women interest a sculptor), that he had almost entirely forgotten, for the time being, his anomalous position. ‘No, not an invalid,’ he answered evasively, ‘but a very old gentleman.’ ‘Ah,’ the colonel put in, as the train moved away from Dijon station, ‘I don’t wonder people travel by coupe-lit when they can afford it, in spite of the prohibitive prices set upon it by these French companies. It’s most unpleasant having nothing but first-class carriages on the train. You have to travel with your own servants.’
Colin smiled feebly, but said nothing. It began to strike him that in the innocence of his heart he had made a mistake in being beguiled into conversation with these grand people. And yet it was their own fault. Miss Gwen had clearly done it all, with her seductive inquiries about art and artists.
‘Or rather,’ the colonel went on, ‘one can always put one’s own servants, of course, into another carriage; but one’s never safe against having to travel with other people’s. We’re lucky to-day in being a pleasant party all together (these French gentlemen, though they’re not companionable, are evidently very decent people); but sometimes, I know, I’ve had to travel on the Continent here, wedged in immovably between a fat lady’s-maid and a gentleman’s gentleman.’
Colin’s face burned hot and crimson. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, in a faltering voice, almost relapsing in his confusion into his aboriginal Dorsetshire, ‘but I ought, perhaps, to have told you sooner who you are travelling with. I am valet to Sir Henry Wilberforce: he is the gentleman in the coupé-lit, and he’s my master.’
The colonel sank back on his cushions with a face as white as marble, while Colin’s now flushed as red as a damask rose. ‘A valet!’ he cried faintly. ‘Gwen, my dear, did he say a valet? What can all this mean? Didn’t he tell us he was a sculptor going to Rome to practise his profession?’
‘I did,’ Colin answered defiantly, for he was on his mettle now. ‘I did tell you so, and it’s the truth. But I’m going as a valet. I couldn’t afford to go in any other way, and so I took a situation, meaning to use my spare time in Rome to study sculpture.’
The colonel rocked himself up and down irresolutely