Winter's Tales (34 page)
When Charlie had drunk his absinthe, he became more communicative; he leaned his arm on the table and his chin in his hand, and slowly and gravely said: “Thou shalt love thy art with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And thou shalt love thy public as thyself.” And after a while he added: “All human relationships have in them something monstrous and cruel. But the relation of the artist to the public is amongst the most monstrous. Yes, it is as terrible as marriage.” At that he gave Æneas a deep, bitter and harassed glance, as if he did see, in him, his public incarnated.
“For,” he went on, “we are, the artist and the public, much against our own will, dependent upon one another for our very
existence.” Here again Charlie’s eyes, dark with pain, fired a deadly accusation at his friend. Æneas felt the poet to be in such a dangerous state of mind that anything but a trivial remark might throw him off his balance. “If it be so,” he said, “has not your public made you a pleasant existence?” But even these words so bewildered Charlie that he sat in silence for a long time. “My God,” he said at last, “do you think that I am talking of my daily bread—of this glass, or of my coat and cravat? For the love of Christ, try to understand what I say. Nay, we are, each of us, awaiting the consent, or the co-operation of the other to be brought into existence at all. Where there is no work of art to look at, or to listen to, there can be no public either; that is clear, I suppose, even to you? And as to the work of art, now—does a painting exist at which no one looks?—does a book exist which is never read? No, Æneas, they have got to be looked at; they have got to be read. And again by the very act of being looked at, or of being read, they bring into existence that formidable being, the spectator, the which, sufficiently multiplied—and we want it multiplied, miserable creatures that we are—will become the public. And so there we are, as you see, at the mercy of it.” “In that case,” said Æneas, “do show a little mercy to one another.” “Mercy? What are you talking about?” said Charlie, and fell into deep thought. After a long pause he said, very slowly: “We cannot show mercy to one another. The public cannot be merciful to an artist; if it were merciful it would not be the public. Thank God for that, in any case. Neither can an artist be merciful to his public, or it has, at least, never been tried.
“No,” he said, “I shall explain to you how it does stand with us. All works of art are beautiful and perfect. And all of them are, at the same time, hideous, ludicrous, complete failures. At the moment when I begin a book it is always lovely. I look at it, and I see that it is good. While I am at the first chapter of it it is so well
balanced, there is such sweet agreement between the various parts, as to make its entirety a marvellous harmony and generally, at that time, the last chapter of the book is the finest of all. But it is also, from the very moment it is begun, followed by a horrible shadow, a loathsome, sickening deformity, which all the same is like it, and does at times—yes, does often—change places with it, so that I myself will not recognize my work, but will shrink from it, like the farm wife from the changeling in her cradle, and cross myself at the idea that I have ever held it to be my own flesh and bone. Yes, in short and in truth, every work of art is both the idealization and the perversion, the caricature of itself. And the public has power to make it, for good or evil, the one or the other. When the heart of the public is moved and shaken by it, so that with tears of contrition and pride they acclaim it as a masterpiece, it becomes that masterpiece which I did myself at first see. And when they denounce it as insipid and worthless, it becomes worthless. But when they will not look at it at all—
voilà
, as they say in this town, it does not exist. In vain shall I cry to them: ‘Do you see nothing there?’ They will answer me, quite correctly: ‘Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.’ Æneas, if the case of the artist be so with his public, it is not good to paint or to write books.
“But do not imagine,” he said after a time, “that I have no compassion with the public, or am not aware of my guilt towards them. I do have compassion with them, and it weighs on my mind. I have had to read the Book of Job, to get strength to bear my responsibility at all,” “Do you see yourself in the place of Job, Charlie?” asked Æneas. “No,” said Charlie solemnly and proudly, “in the place of the Lord.
“I have behaved to my reader,” he went on slowly, “as the Lord behaves to Job. I know, none so well, none so well as I, how the Lord needs Job as a public, and cannot do without him. Yes, it is
even doubtful whether the Lord be not more dependent upon Job than Job upon the Lord. I have laid a wager with Satan about the soul of my reader. I have marred his path and turned terrors upon him, caused him to ride on the wind and dissolved his substance, and when he waited for light there was darkness. And Job does not want to be the Lord’s public any more than my public wishes to be so to me.” Charlie sighed and looked down into his glass, then lifted it to his lips and emptied it.
“Still,” he said, “in the end the two are reconciled; it is good to read about. For the Lord in the whirlwind pleads the defense of the artist, and of the artist only. He blows up the moral scruples and the moral sufferings of his public; he does not attempt to justify his show by any argument on right and wrong. ‘Wilt thou disannul my judgment?’ asks the Lord. ‘Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Hast thou walked in the search of the depth? Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds? Canst thou bind the sweet influence of the Pleiades?’ Yes, he speaks about the horrors and abominations of existence, and airily asks his public if they, too, will play with them as with a bird, and let their young persons do the same. And Job indeed is the ideal public. Who amongst us will ever again find a public like that? Before such arguments he bows his head and foregoes his grievance; he sees that he is better off, and safer, in the hands of the artist than with any other power of the world, and he admits that he has uttered what he understood not.” Charlie made a pause. “The Lord did the same thing to me, once,” he said gravely, sighed and went on: “I have read the Book of Job many times,” Charlie concluded, “at night, when I could not sleep. And I have slept badly these last months.” He sat silent, lost in remembrance.
“But all the same I wonder,” he said after a long pause, “what is the meaning of the whole thing. Why may we not give up painting and writing, and give the public peace? What good do we do them,
in the end? What good, in the end, is art to man? Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”
Æneas by this time had finished his dinner, and was quietly sipping his coffee. “Monsieur Kohl, my principal,” he said, “is himself a dilettante of pictures, and keen to make a gallery in his hotel. But as he has no real knowledge of painting, and no leisure to learn about it, the selection of his pictures used to vex and trouble him. Now, however, I have on his behalf gone round to the painters, one by one, and have asked each of them to sell me the one picture which, out of all he has ever painted, he personally holds to be the best. Our gallery is growing, and it is going to be very fine.”
“He is wrong,” said Charlie gloomily. “The artist himself cannot say which is his finest work. Even if your artists be honest people, and you have not foisted upon you the picture which they cannot sell to anybody else—such as you deserve to have—they cannot tell.” “No, they cannot tell,” said Æneas. “But a collection of pictures, each of which has been picked by the painter as the finest he has ever painted, may well, in the end, tickle the curiosity of the public, and fetch its price at a sale.”
“And you yourself,” said Charlie bitterly, “you go on the errand of a rich dilettante from one artist to another. But you have never, upon your own, painted a picture, or bought one. When, in time, you quit this world of ours, you might as well not have lived.” Æneas nodded his head. “What do you nod your head at?” asked Charlie. “At what you are saying,” said Æneas. “I might as well not have lived.”
Charlie had now rid himself of the restlessness and chagrin that had beset him as he first came into the café, and he felt that it would be pleasanter to listen than to go on speaking. He also found that he was hungry, and ordered dinner. By the time when he had finished his soup he leaned back in his chair, glanced round the
room as if he saw it for the first time, and in a low and languid voice, like that of a convalescent, said to Æneas: “Can you not even tell me a story?”
Æneas stirred his coffee with his spoon, and picked up the sugar left on the bottom of the cup. He put the napkin to his small mouth, folded it and laid it on the table. “Yes, I can tell you a story,” he said. He sat for a minute or two, ransacking his memory. During that time, although he kept so quiet, he was changed; the prim bailiff faded away, and in his seat sat a deep and dangerous little figure, consolidated, alert and ruthless—the story-teller of all the ages. “Yes,” he said at last, and smiled, “I can tell you a consolatory story,” and in a sweet and modulated voice he began.
When I was a young man, I was in the employ of an esteemed firm of carpet dealers in London, and was by them designated to travel to Persia, there to buy up a consignment of ancient carpets. But by the dispensations of destiny I became, for two years, during a period of political unrest and intrigue, when the English and the Russians vied for the greater influence with the Persian Court, physician in ordinary to the ruler of Persia, Mahommed Shah, a highly deserving Prince. He suffered great distress from erysipelas, a disease against which I had been happy enough to find a cure. The present Shah, Nasrud-Din Mirza, was then heir-apparent to the throne.
Nasrud-Din was a lively young Prince, keen on progress and reform, and of a willful and fantastic mind. He was ambitious to know the conditions and circumstances of his subjects, from the highest to the poorest, and gave himself or his surroundings no rest in this pursuit. He had studied the tales of the Arabian Nights, and from this reading he fancied for himself the role of the Caliph Haroun of Bagdad. So he would often, in imitation of this classical
histrionic, all by himself, and in the disguise of a beggar, a peddler or a juggler, wander through his town of Teheran, and visit the market-places or the taverns of it. He listened to the talk of the labourers, water-carriers and prostitutes there, in order to get from them their true opinion on the office-holders and placemen, and upon the custody of justice in the kingdom.
This caprice of the Prince caused much alarm and distress to his old Councillors. For they thought it an untenable and paradoxical state of things that a Prince should be so
au fait
with the doings and sentiments of his people, and one quite likely to upset the whole ancient system of the country. They represented to him the dangers to which he exposed himself, and the injustice that, in his intrepidity, he was doing to the realm of Persia, which might thus wantonly suffer the saddest bereavement. But the more they talked the keener Prince Nasrud-Din became upon his fancy. The ministers then had recourse to other measures. They took care that he should be, wherever he went, secretly followed by armed guards; they also bribed his valets and pages to discover in what disguise he would go, and to what part of the city he would betake himself, and often the beggar or the prostitute with whom the Prince entered into talk had been pre-instructed by the judicious old men. Of this Nasrud-Din knew nothing, and the Councillors dreaded his wrath, should he find out, so that even amongst themselves they kept silent upon their wiles.
Now it came to pass, by the time when I was at Court, that the old High Minister Mirza Aghai one day sought audience with the Prince, and solemnly imparted to him news of a strange and sinister nature.
There was, he said, in the town of Teheran a man, in face, stature and voice so like the Prince Nasrud-Din that the Queen, his mother, would hardly know the one from the other. Moreover, the
stranger in all his ways minutely imitated and copied the manner and habits of the Prince. This man had for some months been walking through the poorest quarters of the city, in the disguise of a beggar, similar to that which the Prince was wont to wear, had seated himself by the gates or the walls, and there questioned and held forth to the people. Did not the fact, the old Minister asked, prove the danger of the Prince’s sport? For what would lie behind it? The mystificator was either a tool in the hands of the Shah’s enemies, set by them to sow discontent and rebellion amongst the populace, or he was an impostor of unheard temerity, working upon some dark scheme of his own, and possibly nurturing the horrible plan of doing away with the heir to the throne, and of passing himself off to the people as the Prince. The old man had let all the foes of the Royal House pass muster in his mind. Before him had then risen the shadow of a great lord, cousin to the Shah and decapitated in a rebellion twenty years ago, and he remembered to have heard that a posthumous son had been born to the outlaw’s name. This youth, Mirza Aghai reflected, might well endeavour to revenge his father, and to get his own back. He begged his young lord to renounce his excursions until such time as the intriguer should have been seized and punished.
Nasrud-Din listened to the Chamberlain’s proposal and played with the silken tassels of his sword-knot. What, he asked, did this strange plotter, the double of himself, tell the people, and what impression had he made upon them? “My lord,” said Mirza Aghai, “What exactly he has told the people I cannot report, partly because his sayings seem to be deep and twofold, so that those who have heard them do not remember them, and partly because he really does not say much. But the impression which he has made is sure to be very profound. For he is not content to investigate their lot, but has set himself upon sharing it with them. He is known to
have slept by the walls on winter nights, to have lived upon the leavings which the portionless paupers have spared to him, and, when they had nothing to give, to have kept fast for a whole day. He frequents the cheapest prostitutes of the city in order to convince the poor of his compassion and fellow-feeling. Yes, to insinuate, himself with the lowest of your townfolk, under your favour, he keeps company with a girl who, in the tavern of a market-place, gives performances with a donkey. And all this, my Prince, within your effigy.”
