The Call of the Town Part 16

"Your view of art is somewhat Philistine, don't you think? The artist's business is not with morals but with truth, and truth is not always beautiful."

"But there must be a purpose behind every work of art--a moral purpose, I mean," the younger man persisted, although he was conscious he was no match in argument against the defender of "Ashes."

Henry's opinions were still in that state of flux when a young man's thoughts take on some colouring from every influence that touches them, and are only in a very minor degree the expression of his own mind.

"The only purpose the artist need avow is to express the truth as he sees it," continued Mr. Puddephatt confidently. "I shall admit that the picture set forth in this novel is ugly, but I believe it to be true.

Remember, we have the butcher's shop as well as the pastrycook's in Nature, and I fancy the former is the larger establishment."

"Admitted," Henry retorted, with lessening fervour, "but are we not told that the end of art is to please?"

"a.s.suredly; to please what?--Our sense of the artistic. The Italians have a fine way of talking about 'beautiful ugliness,' and if the artist, working within the limits of his medium, proves to others that the thing he has produced--picture, statue, book--is in tune with Nature, let it be never so ugly, it must still please our artistic sense."

Henry found himself wandering in a _cul de sac_ of thought. This man who opposed his mind to his could out-manoeuvre him at every move. He was painfully conscious now that opinions he had thought to be his own were only unwinnowed sheaves of thought gleaned in the field of his reading.

Still, he felt that with pen in hand, and no quick answer to each phrase, he could prove his case. How often does the writing man feel thus.

"But there is nothing in this book, so far as I can see," urged Henry warmly, "that tends to elevate the mind to better things. It may be true what you say of the butcher's shop, but the pastrycook's is a pleasanter place any day."

"Ah, my young friend, that way lies indigestion," the other retorted, smiling. "It is none of the artist's business to elevate; it is his function to interpret life, and you will tramp far along the dusty road of life to find anything that elevates. The fact is, when I--I mean, when Adrian Grant set himself to write that book, I believe his purpose was to attack the mawkish sentimentality of our contemporary fiction, to strike a blow at the shoddy romance which is the worst form of art.

For my part, deliver me, I pray, from all writers who seek to elevate.

The true watchword is 'Art for art's sake.'"

"To me it seems rather 'Art for dirt's sake,'" Henry rejoined a little savagely, and a shadow of displeasure clouded the features of his visitor at the words. "But admitting all you say, is there no Power apart from ourselves that tends to draw our thoughts, our very souls, upward?"

"I have looked for it in vain," the other speaker replied, with a languid wave of the hand. "What about the life of our slums, for instance? Is every man and woman there a villain, a lost soul? Surely not. Yet we see every evil rampant, we see every virtue dead; vice triumphant. Who is to blame? The people: the victims? Surely not. Reason says no, a thousand times. Where is this Power you speak of when slumland exists, a horror? But in Kensington there is as little that elevates as there is in Whitechapel. The honest man loses generally in the struggle; the scoundrel flaunts himself before high heaven; he rides in mayoral furs, he swarms into Parliament, he mounts the very pulpit itself."

Henry was abashed and silent before the impa.s.sioned language of the speaker, who had suddenly flamed up and risen from his seat, pacing the room with restless strides while he declaimed and gesticulated surprisingly for one who had seemed so self-possessed, so _blase_. Henry was silent because of his inability to understand the mystery of pain--a mystery to older heads than his.

"I have searched the world for a principle, for a law of life,"

exclaimed Mr. P., stopping suddenly and looking the journalist straight in the face, "and I have never scented one."

"We are told to love one another," said Henry, almost timidly.

"Well, do you find that principle at work? I find hate, malice, inhumanity, wherever I turn my eyes. That is what I meant by the butcher's shop. I find ministers preaching the gospel of peace and b.u.t.tressing the policy of war and plunder. I find hypocrisy enthroned, honesty contemned."

"But if one believes in the Word of G.o.d, is it not better to be the honest man contemned than the throned hypocrite?"

"If we find every fact of life at cross-purpose with Scripture, what then?"

"Perhaps you don't believe in the Bible?" Henry put it thus bluntly to him.

"I prefer to say that it does not convince me. It tells, for example, of a man who was guilty of a paltry fraud in attempting to cheat a small number of his fellows; and upon whom, in the very act, sudden destruction fell. He was struck down dead, we are told. Where to-day is that Power which meted out such swift and deadly punishment? Here, in this town, men lie and cheat with impunity, and on a scale which involves hundreds of innocent victims. The Divine vengeance slumbers.

G.o.d--if there is a G.o.d--sleeps; or else looks on with supreme indifference to the sufferings of His creatures."

"It is all a great mystery, I confess," returned Henry, with something very like a sigh.

The anchor of faith, which had of late been dragging, seemed almost to have slipped, and he felt himself drifting out into dark and troubled waters. This was the young man who, less than an hour ago, was vowing to trounce the author of "Ashes" for his gloomy view of life. The thought had come to him that perhaps his very faith was a mere convention of early teaching. He sat ill at ease before his visitor, whose pa.s.sionate outburst had left both without further speech. It was a strange conclusion of an irresponsible gossip on the art of literature. After looking for a minute or two at Henry's book-shelves, Mr. Puddephatt said abruptly:

"I am indebted to you for a most enjoyable hour, Mr. Charles, and hope we shall see more of each other in the future."

"I hope so too," answered Henry, at a loss for words, his brain in a whirl of distracting thought.

When the mysterious Mr. P. quitted the room, Henry felt that his lightly-chosen epithet was more suitable than ever. But it was less of the man he thought, as he now unconsciously imitated him in pacing his room, than of the ideas he had enunciated; these had instantly become detached from their originator and boiled up in Henry's mind with all the lees of youthful doubts and questionings that had been lying there.

The mental ferment had a hara.s.sing effect on him. Almost for the first time in his life he felt a strange desire to turn inside out his spiritual nature and find what it consisted of. And the next instant the thought was madness to him.

"I said to him that we are told to love one another," he reflected, setting his teeth defiantly. "If we did, then evil would cease out of the world. So the religion which teaches this must be right. But we don't do so--he was right there--and if our natures are not capable of this love, what profits the advice? He's no fool; but the way seems very dark. I half wish he hadn't touched the subject."

As these thoughts were coursing through Henry's mind, the strains of a 'cello, soothing and sensuous, came from the room above, adding a dramatic touch to a memorable experience, and reminding him startlingly that he had never spoken a word to Mr. P. about his music.

The lateness of the hour surprised Henry, who threw himself down in a chair and stared blankly at the dying embers in the grate, while the musician sounded with exquisite touch the closing bars of a nocturne.

CHAPTER XVI

DRIFTING

WHEN Henry's review of "Ashes" appeared, it was not so violent an attack on the author as he had meant it to be. Indeed, he was half-ashamed when he read in print what he had written about that much-discussed book; in certain pa.s.sages it sounded suspiciously like Mr. P.'s own phrases.

"We shall admit that it is no business of art to concern itself with morals." Where did we hear the words before? "It is, alas, only too true that life is not all sweetness: it has more than a dash of bitter." A plat.i.tude; and borrowed at that. "But we must not suppose that only beauty is true and artistic: ugliness may still be of the very essence of art." Really, the fiddler fellow might have done the review himself.

No doubt, when he read it, he felt that it was mainly his.

Henry had yet to discover that the opinions he gave forth with so much pomp and circ.u.mstance had been unconsciously pilfered. The mind of every young man is an unblushing thief. It drifts into honest ways in due time, however, and when it does not, the aged plagiarist may argue that he still remains young.

In a word, the influence of Mr. Puddephatt fell upon Henry at a most critical moment in his zigzag journey towards sober common-sense, and the modified tone of the review indicated a similar change in the inner thoughts of the young journalist--too sudden, perhaps, to be alarming.

But it was apparent that he had become unsettled in his religious convictions as the result of frequent subsequent meetings with his fellow-lodger, who exercised a conscious fascination over the younger man, and could induce Henry to reveal his inmost thoughts without himself volunteering much about his own personal history. Mr. P. was actuated, no doubt, mainly by sheer interest in his friend, and had no sinister end--as he conceived it--in view. So the friendship grew, to the no small annoyance of Flo Winton, who had frequent cause to chide her lover for giving more of his scanty leisure to Mr. P. than to one--mentioning no names--who had perhaps more claim upon it.

At the _Leader_ office he was finding things less to his mind than he had hoped. Five years ago the editorship of a daily paper was a golden dream to him; a year ago, his brightest hope; to-day, a post involving much drudgery, more diplomacy and temporising; small satisfaction.

He imagined that his case was exceptional. "If this," and "granted that," the editorship of the _Leader_ was an ideal post. Minus the ifs, it was not a bed of roses. The cyclist who is b.u.mping along a rough road notices that his friend is wheeling smoothly on the other side, and steers across to get on the smooth track, just as his friend leaves it for the same reason reversed.

We all suppose our trials to be exceptional, and the chances are that the people we are envying are envying us. Conceivably, the editorship of the _Times_ is not heavenly. There were some hundreds of ambitious journalists ready to rush for Henry's post the moment he showed signs of quitting. A newspaper that has had fifteen editors in five years will have five hundred candidates for the job when the fifteenth gives up the struggle. Henry had learned at the rate of a year a week since he became editor.

That leader yesterday had displeased the chairman of directors, as it was somewhat outspoken in favour of munic.i.p.al trams, and the chairman was a shareholder in the existing company. Another director wanted to see more news from the colliery districts than the paper usually contained, and a third fancied that the City news was not full enough.

Yet another, a wealthy hosiery manufacturer, who was wont to boast himself a "self-made man," pointed out that they didn't like leaders to be humorous, and he was open to bet as the heditor was wrong in saying "politics was tabu," when everybody knoo as 'ow the word was "tabooed."

He'd looked it hup in the dictionary 'imself. Politics and newspaper-editorship bring us strange bedfellows.

The simple truth was that Henry, all too soon, had learned what an editor's responsibility meant. It meant supporting the political programme of the party which the paper represented, temporising with selfish interests, humouring ignorance when it wore diamond rings, toiling for others to take the credit, and blundering for oneself to bear the blame.

Many of these worries would have been absent from the editorship of a really first-cla.s.s newspaper; but first-cla.s.s journals are seldom edited by young men of twenty-two or thereby. Henry had no financial control--a good thing for him, perhaps--and the manager had won the confidence of the directors through procuring dividends by cutting down expenses. He saved sixpence a week by insisting on the caretaker, who made tea for the staff every evening, buying in a less quant.i.ty of milk. He pointed out to the poor woman that she was unduly severe on scrubbing-brushes, and after refusing to sign a bill for a sixpenny ball of string required in the packing department, on the plea that "there was a deal of waste going on," he went out to dine with Sir Henry Field, the chairman of directors, to the tune of a guinea a head "for the prestige of the paper." He had even stopped the _Spectator_ and the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, which had been bought for the editor in the past, urging that it was dangerous to read them, as that might interfere with the editor's originality in his leaders. Besides, it saved a shilling a week, and really one didn't know what journalistic compet.i.tion was coming to.

Yet Henry had "succeeded," though he had not "arrived." Best evidence of his success was the jealousy which he created among the older members of the staff, and the contempt in which his name was held in the rival newspaper offices. But he was not satisfied. In less than a year he had ceased to thrill with pride when he was spoken of as editor of the _Leader_. The political party of which his paper was the avowed local mouthpiece had won a splendid victory at the School Board election, "thanks in no small degree to the able support of the _Leader_," the orators averred when they performed the mutual back-patting at the Liberal Club meeting. Sir Henry Field bowed his acknowledgments of the praise when he rose; and the manager of the _Leader_ was much in evidence. Henry was at that moment writing away at his desk with his coat off. This is the pathetic side of journalism and of life--one man sows, another reaps.

Nor was Henry's love affair progressing more happily than his experience of editing. The swelled head was subsiding; perhaps the swelled heart also. He heard frequently from home, and there was occasional mention of Eunice; and when his eye caught the name in his sister's letters he had a momentary twinge of a regret which he could not express, and did not quite understand.

Flo Winton had in no wise altered so far as he was capable of judging.