Amaryllis at the Fair Part 23

He could stop when he liked and take a swig of stout. That was the Alere style.

Smoking was forbidden in the old House of Flamma because of the worm-eaten beams, the worm-eaten rafters and staircase, the dusty, decayed bookshelves, the dry, rotten planks of the floor, the thin wooden part.i.tions, all ready to catch fire at the mere sight of a match.

Also because of the piles of mouldy books which choked the place, and looked fit for nothing but a bonfire, but which were worth thousands of pounds; the plates and lithographic stones, artists' proofs, divers and sundry Old Masters in a room upstairs, all easily destructible.

But Alere, being a son of the house, though not in command, did not choose to be amenable to rules and orders in fact, in fiction he was. He smoked and kept the glue-pot ready on the stove; if a certain step was known to be approaching the pipe was thrust out of sight, and some dry glue set melting, the powerful incense quite hiding the flavour of tobacco. A good deal of dry glue is used in London in this way.

If I could but write the inside history of Fleet Street, I should be looked upon as the most wonderful exponent of human life that had ever touched a pen. Balzac--whom everybody talks of and n.o.body has read, because the discrimination of Paternoster Row has refused him a translation till quite lately--Zola, who professes to be realistic, who is nothing if not realistic, but whose writings are so curiously crude and merely skim the surface; even the great Hugo, who produced the masterpiece of all fiction, _Les Miserables_; all three of them, the entire host of ma.n.u.script-makers, I am sure I could vanquish them all, if I could only write the inside life of Fleet Street.

Not in any grace of style or sweeping march of diction, but just pencil-jotted in the roughest words to hand, just as rich and poor, well-dressed ladies and next-door beggars are bundled into a train, so, without choice of language, but hustling the first words anyhow, as it were, into the first compartment. If I could only get Alere to tell me all he had seen in Fleet Street, and could just jot it down on the margin of a stained newspaper, all the world would laugh and weep. For such things do go on in Fleet Street as no man has written yet.

If only Victor Hugo were alive and young again!

Alere liked pulling off the proofs in his shirt-sleeves, swigging his stout, smoking on the sly, working with all the genius of an inspired mechanic one moment and dropping into absolute idleness the next, spending infinite pains in finishing one bit of work, as if his very life depended on the smoothing of an edge of paper, putting off the next till the end of the month, pottering, sleeping, gossiping, dreaming over old German works, and especially dreaming over Goethe, humming old German songs--for he had been a great traveller--sometimes scrawling a furious Mazzinian onslaught in a semi-Nihilist foreign print, collecting stray engravings, wandering hither and thither.

Alere Flamma, artist, engraver, bookbinder, connoisseur, traveller, printer, Republican, conspirator, sot, smoker, dreamer, poet, kind-hearted, good-natured, prodigal, shiftless, man of Fleet Street, carpet-bag man, gentleman shaken to pieces.

He worked in his shirt-sleeves and drank stout, but nothing vulgar had ever been recorded against Alere Flamma. He frequented strong company--very strong meat--but no vile word left his lips.

There was a delicacy in all his ways in the midst of the coa.r.s.est surroundings, just as he appeared in the press-room among the printer's ink in the whitest of clean shirt-sleeves, fit to wear with the abhorred dress-coat.

In his rooms at his lodgings there were literally hundreds of sketches, done on all sorts and sizes of paper, from the inside of an envelope hastily torn open to elephant. The bureau was full of them, crammed in anyhow, neither sorted nor arranged; nothing, of course, could be found if it was wanted. The drawers of the bookcase--it was his own furniture--were full of them; the writing-table drawer; a box in one corner; some were on the mantelpiece smoked and gritty; some inside his books, most of which were interleaved in this manner; literally hundreds of sketches, the subjects as numerous and varied.

Views in English country lanes, views on the Danube, bands playing in band-loving Vienna, old Highgate Archway, studies from Canterbury Cathedral, statuary in the Louvre, ships battling with the north wind in the North Sea--a savage fight between sail and gale--horses in the meadow, an aged butler, a boy whipping a top, charcoal-burners in the Black Forest, studies from the nude--Parisian models, Jewesses, almost life-size, a drayman heaving up a huge tankard, overshadowing his face like Mount Atlas turned over his thumb, designs to ill.u.s.trate cla.s.sical mythology, outlines expressing the ideas of Goethe--outlines of Marguerite and Faust among the roses--"He loves me; he loves me not,"

big-armed Flemish beauties with b.r.e.a.s.t.s as broad as the Zuyder-Zee was deep in the song, roofs of Nuremberg, revolutionary heroes charging their muskets in the famous year '48, when Alere had a bullet through his hat, in Vienna, I think; no end to them.

Sometimes when Alere had done no work for a month or two, and his ten pounds were spent, if he wanted a few guineas he would take a small selection of these round to the office of a certain ill.u.s.trated paper; the Editor would choose, and hand over the money at once, well aware that it was ready money his friend needed. They were not exactly friends--there are no friends in London, only acquaintances--but a little chummy, because the Editor himself had had a fiery youth, and they had met in sunny Wien. That was the only paper that ever got sketches out of Alere.

If only Alere would have gone and sketched what he was _asked_ to sketch! Ah! there is the difference; he could not do it, his nature would not let him; he could draw what he saw with his own eyes, but not what other people wanted him to see. A merry income he might have made if he would only have consented to see what other eyes--common, vulgar eyes--wanted to see, and which he could so easily have drawn for them.

Out of these piles of varied sketches there were two kinds the Editor instantly snapped at: the one was wild flowers, the other little landscape bits.

Wild flowers were his pa.s.sion. They were to Flamma as Juliet to Romeo.

Romeo's love, indeed, rushed up like straw on fire, a great blaze of flame; he perished in it as the straw; perhaps he might not have worshipped Juliet next year. Flamma had loved his wild flowers close upon forty years, ever since he could remember; most likely longer, for doubtless the dumb infant loved the daisies put in his chubby hand.

His pa.s.sion they were still as he drew near fifty, and saw all things become commonplace. That is the saddest of thoughts--as we grow older the romance fades, and all things become commonplace.

Half our lives are spent in wishing for to-morrow, the other half in wishing for yesterday.

Wild flowers alone never become commonplace. The white wood-sorrel at the foot of the oak, the violet in the hedge of the vale, the thyme on the wind-swept downs, they were as fresh this year as last, as dear to-day as twenty years since, even dearer, for they grow now, as it were, in the earth we have made for them of our hopes, our prayers, our emotions, our thoughts.

Sketch-book upon sketch-book in Alere's room was full of wild flowers, drawn as he had found them in the lanes and woods at Coombe Oaks--by the footpaths, by the lake and the lesser ponds, on the hills--as he had found them, not formed into an artificial design, not torn up by the roots, or cut and posed for the occasion--exactly as they were when his eye caught sight of them. A difficult thing to do, but Alere did it.

In printing engravings of flowers the ill.u.s.trated magazines usually make one of two mistakes; either the flower is printed without any surroundings or background, and looks thin, quite without interest, however cleverly drawn, or else it is presented with a heavy black pall of ink which dabs it out altogether.

These flowers the Editor bought eagerly, and the little landscapes. From a stile, beside a rick, through a gap in a hedge, odd, unexpected places, Alere caught views of the lake, the vale, the wood, groups of trees, old houses, and got them in his magical way on a few square inches of paper. They were very valuable for book ill.u.s.tration. They were absolutely true to nature and fact.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XXVIII.

PERHAPS the reason Alere never took to colours was because of his inherent and unswerving truthfulness of character. Genuine to a degree, he could not make believe--could not deceive--could not masquerade in a dress-coat.

Now, most of the landscape-painting in vogue to-day is nature in a dress-coat.

In a whole saloon of water colours, in a whole Academy, or Grosvenor Gallery you shall hardly find three works that represent any real scene in the fields.

I have walked about the fields a good deal in my brief, fretful hour, yet I have never seen anything resembling the strange apparitions that are hung on these walls every spring. Apparitions--optical illusions, lit up with watery, greenish, ghastly, ghost-light--nothing like them on earth I swear, and I suspect not in Heaven or Hades.

Touched-up designs: a tree taken from one place, a brook from another, a house from another--_and mixed to order_, like a prescription by the chemist--xv. grs. gra.s.s, 3 dr. stile, iiij. grs. rustic bridge. Nature never plants--nature is no gardener--no design, no proportion in the fields.

Colours! Pa.s.sing a gasworks perhaps you may have noticed that the surface of the water in the ditch by the roadside bears a greenish sc.u.m, a pale prismatic sc.u.m; this is the colour-box of modern landscape.

How horrible the fields would look if they wore such hues in reality as are accepted on canvas at the galleries! Imagine these canvas tints transferred to the sward, the woods, the hills, the streams, the sky!

_Dies irae, dies illae_--it would, indeed, be an awful day, the Last Day of Doom, and we should need the curtain at Drury Lane drawn before our eyes to shut it out of sight.

There are some who can go near to paint dogs and horses, but a meadow of mowing gra.s.s, not one of them can paint that.

Many can _draw_ nature--drawings are infinitely superior generally to the painting that follows; scarce one now paints real nature.

Alere could not squeeze his sketches into the dress-coat of sham colour for any sacred exhibition wall whatever.

One thing Alere never attempted to draw--a bird in flight. He recognized that it was impossible; his taste rejected every conventional att.i.tude that has been used for the purpose; the descending pigeon, the j.a.panese skewered birds, the swallow skimming as heavily as a pillow. You cannot draw a bird in flight. Swallows are attempted oftenest, and done worst of all.

How can you draw life itself? What is life? you cannot even define it.

The swallow's wing has the motion of life--its tremble--its wonderful delicacy of vibration--the instant change--the slip of the air;--no man will ever be able to draw a flying swallow.

At the feet of this Gamaliel of Fleet Street, Amaryllis had sat much, from time to time, when the carpet-bag was packed and Alere withdrew to his Baden-Baden--_i.e._, to Coombe Oaks and apple-bloom, singing finch, and wild-flowers.

There were no "properties" in Alere's room at his lodgings; no odd bits collected during his wanderings to come in useful some day as make-up, realistic rock work, as it were, in the picture. No gauntlets or breast-plates, sc.r.a.ps of old iron; no Turkish guns or yataghans, no stags' horns, china, or carvings to be copied some day into an ill.u.s.tration. No "properties."

No studio effects. The plaster bust that strikes the key and tones the visitors' mind to "Art," the etchings, the wall or panel decorations, the sliding curtains, the easels in the corner, the great portfolios--the well-known "effects" were absent.

A plain room, not even with a north light, plain old furniture, but not very old--not ostensibly ancient, somewhere about 1790 say--and this inherited and not purchased; Flamma cared not one atom for furniture, itself, old or new; dusty books everywhere, under the table, on the mantelpiece, beside the coal scuttle; heaps on chairs, quartos on the sofa, crowds more in his bedroom, besides the two bookcases and drawers; odd books most of them, Cornelius Agrippa, _Le Pet.i.t Albert_, French ill.u.s.trated works, editions of Faust, music, for Flamma was fond of his many-keyed flute.

Great people once now and then called and asked to see Alere Flamma at the business place in Fleet Street; people with t.i.tles, curiously out of place, in the press-room, gold leaf on the floor, odour of printer's ink, dull blows of machinery, rotten planking, part.i.tions pasted over with ill.u.s.trations and stained with beer, the old place trembling as the engine worked; Flamma, in his shirt-sleeves, talking to "His Excellency."

Flamma's opinion, information he could give, things he knew; abroad they thought much of him.

Presents came occasionally--a boar's head from Germany; fine Havana cigars--Alere always had a supply of the best cigars and Turkish tobacco, a perennial stream of tobacco ran for him; English venison; once a curious dagger from Italy, the strangest present good-natured Alere could possibly have received!

Sometimes there came a pressing invitation from a n.o.ble connoisseur to his country seat; Flamma's views were wanted about the re-arrangement of the library, the re-binding of some treasure picked up in a cover all too poor for its value, the building of another wing, for the artist is the true architect, as the princes of Italy knew of old time. Till the artist is called in we shall never again see real architecture in the world. Did not Benvenuto design fortifications? Did not Michael Angelo build St. Peter's at Rome?