Book 111.-CHAPTER I

CONQUEROR OR CONQUERED?

FORESIGHT is insight. It was due to Matthew Strang's igno rance of life and of himself that his marriage in no way turned out as he had calculated. Oh, the fatal mistake of it, perceived as soon as it was too late, though he shrank weakly from the perception, afraid to face the chill, blank truth, hoping against hope that love would be the child of marriage. Oh, the ghastliness of being chained to a loving woman he did not love, bound by law and honor to simulate a responsive affection, and to hide the deadly apathy which her caresses could not overcome. He tried hard to love her, calling his own attention to her youth, her freshness, her prettiness, her flashes of expression, making the most of every hint of charm, seeing her through a wilful glamour, even attempting to persuade himself that she was the woman of his dreams; all the while his leaden heart coldly refusing itself to the hollow pretence. Before the marriage he had almost felt on the point of love; but it was only, he knew later, the self-disguise of cupidity and mercenariness, though no doubt a measure of gratitude had helped to becloud his vision. In his bachelor days he could never have imagined such indifference to any woman. Sometimes he wondered if this was all marriage meant to any man, but a wistful incredulity denied him the consolation of acquiescence in a common lot. The testimony of mankind was quite other, and his own yearning instinct refused to look upon his union as typical. If only she had been a little more intellectual, less limited to gossip about servants and prices! How he had deceived himself, taking the sprightliness of a young girl in love, the coquettish gayety, the evanescent brilliancy of a bird in the pairing season,

for the output of perennial intellect and good-humor! He had lived so much alone with his dreams that he had fallen out of touch with humanity, and particularly with feminine humanity. He had had no standard of comparison by which to gauge her, and once united to her, the habitual recluse could not accommodate himself to her constant companionship.

What an irony their honey-moon in Paris, in Florence, the ardors of artistic renascence yoked with the blankness of boredom! Despite Rosina's affectionate clinging to him, and her almost pathetic endeavor to admire old churches and dingy picture-galleries, it was a relief to both when she at last acquiesced in his happy idea of regarding his rounds as "work," and, under the convoy of Billy, beguiled the expectation of fonder reunion by the more exhilarating spectacle of the streets and the endless glories of the Bon Marché. And very soon she wearied altogether of foreign places, clamoring to be settled in London, where the language was not gibberish, and one could go amarketing without being bamboozled and cut off from bargaining. For after the first fervors of the honey-moon she had developed that instinct for petty economy which had amused and charmed him when he had gone shopping with her in Halifax, but which now fretted him, seeming like a daily reproach for all those great sums her acquisition of him had cost her. He was glad that the due arrival of the second mysterious instalment promised to the Nova-Scotian household relieved him of the painful necessity of applying to her on its behalf. Unexpectedly enough this sum was supplemented by a dividend of a hundred and fifteen dollars paid to him, after he had forgotten all about the matter, by the trustee in Halifax in settlement of his claim against the estate of the Starsborough ship-builder.

In vain he tried to interest his wife in books, in the poems and essays, in the study of French and German, into which he now threw himself with a feverish desire for culture. In vain he tried to impart to her his vision of nature, to get her to observe scenery and sunsets. Colors and shades were only interesting to her as they occurred in dress materials. Once when they stood by a sea-beach on a December afternoon under a cold, gray sky, and Rosina complained of the dreariness of

the seascape, he had attempted to show her how beautiful it really was, how much more interesting to the artistic eye than a crude sunlight effect; how nearest the horizon it was grayish steel-blue, and then a still amber, and then emerald green, and how just before the final fringe of both there shone a band of sparkling amber, grayed by cloud reflections. But Rosina shivered, and refused to see anything but a chill green waste.

She would not even allow him to arrange her furniture, and a pair of colossal pink vases, garishly hand-painted with pastoral figures (picked up "a bargain "), were a permanent pain to him, spoiling for him the drawing-room of the little North London house with the rude whitewashed studio, in which they had settled down after the birth of their first child. The temporary lull that attended their installation in British domesticity was succeeded by graver frictions when Rosina had finished furnishing. They had no society; neither of the couple knew anybody in London, and the husband shrank from making friends, constrained, moreover, by his art to a solitary way of living. Rosina, who before her child demanded her care had sat to him out of pure desire to be with him, began to be jealous of the models who replaced her, declaring that she had had no conception such goings-on were a part of art or she would never have married him.

The only alleviation of his numb misery was his ability to paint without pecuniary under-thought the picture with which he was to storm the Academy, to throw all his individuality into it. The very seclusion of his life favored this devotion to his ideals.

And these ideals were only partially those of his celibate. He had been swaying to and fro under the opposite solicitations of Idealism and Realism; now in a violent upheaval, his sympathy with modern subjects and even with modern methods had been submerged.

On the Continent for the first time he came into contact with the Old World. London had been to him as modern as America, repeating its ideas and ideals, but in France, and more especially in Italy, the mere variation of tongues helped to draw him into an earlier world, co-operated with the appeal of ancient churches and streets and palaces, and the countless treasure of ancient Art.

The modern world grew hateful to him, and he absorbed by
affinity the ancient and the mediæval. At bottom it was not so
much the modern that repelled him as real life, and it was not
so much the past towards which he yearned as towards that
timeless realm wherein ideal beauty dwells. The past was at
least less real than the present. Real life was horrible, and mar-
riage had put the coping-stone on his dissatisfaction with it.
From birth to death it was embased by a sordid series of phys-
ical processes.
Even the much-vaunted love was hideous at
root. Beauty itself was never really perfect, and was transient
at best, while the beautiful idea that lurked in nearly every hu-
man face and figure had for the most part been left embryonic.
Only in Art could the imperfections of Nature be corrected-
and this was the Artist's mission, not to imitate Nature, but to
transcend her; from her faulty individuals, frail and perishable,
to draw types of perfection, flawless, immortal, like that Venus
de Milo, which stood at the end of the Louvre passage, beautiful
from every standpoint, fixing in its pensive sweetness of spiritual-
ized form his dream of Ideal Womanhood; or like that mighty
torso of winged Victory that had achieved the last victory over
its own mutilation. Real life was Deacon Hailey and his mad
mother and Billy and Rosina and his uncle and the grimy denizens
of the London slums and the blackguardly crowd at the Fleet
Street public-house and the lewd workmen in the Starsborough
ship-yard. But Art was Rosalind and Imogen, Hamlet and
Ariel, Don Quixote and Beatrix Esmond, and the love in Shel-
ley's lyrics, and the music of Beethoven, and the pictures of
Botticelli, and the cold white statues of the Greeks-that imag-
inary world which man's soul had called into being to redress
the balance of the Real. It was Art against Nature throughout
-the immortal shadows against the ephemeral realities.

"She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love and she be fair."

And so for the "real atmosphere" of Cornpepper he no longer cared what mattered the realities of space more than those of time to the soul, emperor of its own fantasy? All this scientific precision after which he had been hankering-was it

not irrelevant to Art? The Beautiful was the Ideal; to create the Ideal, the Real must be passed through the crucible of the Artist's soul. The Artist was the true creator. In him Nature's yearning to beget the Beautiful became conscious. She herself had infinite failures-ugly moods, fogs, glooms, skies of iron, seas of tin. And feeling all this instinctively rather than by a lucid excogitation, he was now for the ideal, for the romantic, for the religious even, for anything that was not real, that shut out the unbeautiful necessity, as those glorious stained windows of cathedrals, blazing with saints, shut out the crude daylight and the raw air of reality, filtering the garish sunlight to that dim religious light in which the soul could see best. Ah, how wisely the poor human soul had fenced itself in against the bleak realities-even as the body had housed itself against the inhospitalities of Nature-painting its windows with beautiful dreams, with an incarnate Love that ruled the world, and an image of immaculate Motherhood. And in a strange hybrid, hazy blend of Catholicism and Hellenism, possible only to an artist who sees things by their sensuous outsides, the Venus de Milo and the Madonna of the Italian masters were to him more akin by beauty than divorced by dogma. In a sense they were one-the highest types of Beauty conceivable by the Pagan and Christian ages, so akin that when Botticelli came to draw Venus, as in his "Nascita di Venere," his brush fashioned a meek Miltonic Eve, prefiguring the Virgin Mother, while Andrea del Sarto, in his Annunziazone in the "Pitti," had given the Virgin Mother almost the brooding serenity of a Greek goddess. Ideal Womanhood, Ideal Womanhood, this was what poor Matthew Strang seemed to find in either-ay, and even in Perugino's "Magdalen," and the saying of Keats, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," seemed to him to be indeed all that mortals needed to know.

But that Pagan serenity which had produced Greek art could not be his. For him as for the ages the first sensuous joy in beauty was over. And what appealed even more than the Greek marbles to the artist who had set out from his native village with quick blood, worshipper of a beautiful world, was that subtler art which expressed rather the inad