The Greater Inclination

It was at Mrs. Mellish’s, one Sunday afternoon last spring.  We were talking over George Lillo’s portraits—­a collection of them was being shown at Durand-Ruel’s—­and a pretty woman had emphatically declared:—­

“Nothing on earth would induce me to sit to him!”

There was a chorus of interrogations.

“Oh, because—­he makes people look so horrid; the way one looks on board ship, or early in the morning, or when one’s hair is out of curl and one knows it.  I’d so much rather be done by Mr. Cumberton!”

Little Cumberton, the fashionable purveyor of rose-water pastels, stroked his moustache to hide a conscious smile.

“Lillo is a genius—­that we must all admit,” he said indulgently, as though condoning a friend’s weakness; “but he has an unfortunate temperament.  He has been denied the gift—­so precious to an artist—­of perceiving the ideal.  He sees only the defects of his sitters; one might almost fancy that he takes a morbid pleasure in exaggerating their weak points, in painting them on their worst days; but I honestly believe he can’t help himself.  His peculiar limitations prevent his seeing anything but the most prosaic side of human nature—­

  “’A primrose by the river’s brim
  A yellow primrose is to him,
  And it is nothing more.’”

Cumberton looked round to surprise an order in the eye of the lady whose sentiments he had so deftly interpreted, but poetry always made her uncomfortable, and her nomadic attention had strayed to other topics.  His glance was tripped up by Mrs. Mellish.

“Limitations?  But, my dear man, it’s because he hasn’t any limitations, because he doesn’t wear the portrait-painter’s conventional blinders, that we’re all so afraid of being painted by him.  It’s not because he sees only one aspect of his sitters, it’s because he selects the real, the typical one, as instinctively as a detective collars a pick-pocket in a crowd.  If there’s nothing to paint—­no real person—­he paints nothing; look at the sumptuous emptiness of his portrait of Mrs. Guy Awdrey”—­(“Why,” the pretty woman perplexedly interjected, “that’s the only nice picture he ever did!”) “If there’s one positive trait in a negative whole he brings it out in spite of himself; if it isn’t a nice trait, so much the worse for the sitter; it isn’t Lillo’s fault:  he’s no more to blame than a mirror.  Your other painters do the surface—­he does the depths; they paint the ripples on the pond, he drags the bottom.  He makes flesh seem as fortuitous as clothes.  When I look at his portraits of fine ladies in pearls and velvet I seem to see a little naked cowering wisp of a soul sitting beside the big splendid body, like a poor relation in the darkest corner of an opera-box.  But look at his pictures of really great people—­ how great they are!  There’s plenty of ideal there.  Take his Professor Clyde; how clearly the man’s history is written in those broad steady strokes of the brush:  the hard work, the endless patience, the fearless imagination of the great savant!  Or the picture of Mr. Domfrey—­the man who has felt beauty without having the power to create it.  The very brush-work expresses the difference between the two; the crowding of nervous tentative lines, the subtler gradations of color, somehow convey a suggestion of dilettantism.  You feel what a delicate instrument the man is, how every sense has been tuned to the finest responsiveness.”  Mrs. Mellish paused, blushing a little at the echo of her own eloquence.  “My advice is, don’t let George Lillo paint you if you don’t want to be found out—­or to find yourself out.  That’s why I’ve never let him do me; I’m waiting for the day of judgment,” she ended with a laugh.

Every one but the pretty woman, whose eyes betrayed a quivering impatience to discuss clothes, had listened attentively to Mrs. Mellish.  Lillo’s presence in New York—­he had come over from Paris for the first time in twelve years, to arrange the exhibition of his pictures—­gave to the analysis of his methods as personal a flavor as though one had been furtively dissecting his domestic relations.  The analogy, indeed, is not unapt; for in Lillo’s curiously detached existence it is difficult to figure any closer tie than that which unites him to his pictures.  In this light, Mrs. Mellish’s flushed harangue seemed not unfitted to the trivialities of the tea hour, and some one almost at once carried on the argument by saying:—­“But according to your theory—­that the significance of his work depends on the significance of the sitter—­his portrait of Vard ought to be a master-piece; and it’s his biggest failure.”

Alonzo Vard’s suicide—­he killed himself, strangely enough, the day that Lillo’s pictures were first shown—­had made his portrait the chief feature of the exhibition.  It had been painted ten or twelve years earlier, when the terrible “Boss” was at the height of his power; and if ever man presented a type to stimulate such insight as Lillo’s, that man was Vard; yet the portrait was a failure.  It was magnificently composed; the technique was dazzling; but the face had been—­well, expurgated.  It was Vard as Cumberton might have painted him—­a common man trying to look at ease in a good coat.  The picture had never before been exhibited, and there was a general outcry of disappointment.  It wasn’t only the critics and the artists who grumbled.  Even the big public, which had gaped and shuddered at Vard, revelling in his genial villany, and enjoying in his death that succumbing to divine wrath which, as a spectacle, is next best to its successful defiance—­even the public felt itself defrauded.  What had the painter done with their hero?  Where was the big sneering domineering face that figured so convincingly in political cartoons and patent-medicine advertisements, on cigar-boxes and electioneering posters?  They had admired the man for looking his part so boldly; for showing the undisguised blackguard in every line of his coarse body and cruel face; the pseudo-gentleman of Lillo’s picture was a poor thing compared to the real Vard.  It had been vaguely expected that the great boss’s portrait would have the zest of an incriminating document, the scandalous attraction of secret memoirs; and instead, it was as insipid as an obituary.  It was as though the artist had been in league with his sitter, had pledged himself to oppose to the lust for post-mortem “revelations” an impassable blank wall of negation.  The public was resentful, the critics were aggrieved.  Even Mrs. Mellish had to lay down her arms.

“Yes, the portrait of Vard is a failure,” she admitted, “and I’ve never known why.  If he’d been an obscure elusive type of villain, one could understand Lillo’s missing the mark for once; but with that face from the pit—!”

She turned at the announcement of a name which our discussion had drowned, and found herself shaking hands with Lillo.

The pretty woman started and put her hands to her curls; Cumberton dropped a condescending eyelid (he never classed himself by recognizing degrees in the profession), and Mrs. Mellish, cheerfully aware that she had been overheard, said, as she made room for Lillo—­

“I wish you’d explain it.”

Lillo smoothed his beard and waited for a cup of tea.  Then, “Would there be any failures,” he said, “if one could explain them?”

“Ah, in some cases I can imagine it’s impossible to seize the type—­or to say why one has missed it.  Some people are like daguerreotypes; in certain lights one can’t see them at all.  But surely Vard was obvious enough.  What I want to know is, what became of him?  What did you do with him?  How did you manage to shuffle him out of sight?”

“It was much easier than you think.  I simply missed an opportunity—­”

“That a sign-painter would have seen!”

“Very likely.  In fighting shy of the obvious one may miss the significant—­”

“—­And when I got back from Paris,” the pretty woman was heard to wail, “I found all the women here were wearing the very models I’d brought home with me!”

Mrs. Mellish, as became a vigilant hostess, got up and shuffled her guests; and the question of Yard’s portrait was dropped.

I left the house with Lillo; and on the way down Fifth Avenue, after one of his long silences, he suddenly asked: 

“Is that what is generally said of my picture of Vard?  I don’t mean in the newspapers, but by the fellows who know?”

I said it was.

He drew a deep breath.  “Well,” he said, “it’s good to know that when one tries to fail one can make such a complete success of it.”

“Tries to fail?”

“Well, no; that’s not quite it, either; I didn’t want to make a failure of Vard’s picture, but I did so deliberately, with my eyes open, all the same.  It was what one might call a lucid failure.”

“But why—?”

“The why of it is rather complicated.  I’ll tell you some time—­” He hesitated.  “Come and dine with me at the club by and by, and I’ll tell you afterwards.  It’s a nice morsel for a psychologist.”

At dinner he said little; but I didn’t mind that.  I had known him for years, and had always found something soothing and companionable in his long abstentions from speech.  His silence was never unsocial; it was bland as a natural hush; one felt one’s self included in it, not left out.  He stroked his beard and gazed absently at me; and when we had finished our coffee and liqueurs we strolled down to his studio.

At the studio—­which was less draped, less posed, less consciously “artistic” than those of the smaller men—­he handed me a cigar, and fell to smoking before the fire.  When he began to talk it was of indifferent matters, and I had dismissed the hope of hearing more of Vard’s portrait, when my eye lit on a photograph of the picture.  I walked across the room to look at it, and Lillo presently followed with a light.

“It certainly is a complete disguise,” he muttered over my shoulder; then he turned away and stooped to a big portfolio propped against the wall.

“Did you ever know Miss Vard?” he asked, with his head in the portfolio; and without waiting for my answer he handed me a crayon sketch of a girl’s profile.

I had never seen a crayon of Lillo’s, and I lost sight of the sitter’s personality in the interest aroused by this new aspect of the master’s complex genius.  The few lines—­faint, yet how decisive!—­flowered out of the rough paper with the lightness of opening petals.  It was a mere hint of a picture, but vivid as some word that wakens long reverberations in the memory.

I felt Lillo at my shoulder again.

“You knew her, I suppose?”

I had to stop and think.  Why, of course I’d known her:  a silent handsome girl, showy yet ineffective, whom I had seen without seeing the winter that society had capitulated to Vard.  Still looking at the crayon, I tried to trace some connection between the Miss Vard I recalled and the grave young seraph of Lillo’s sketch.  Had the Vards bewitched him?  By what masterstroke of suggestion had he been beguiled into drawing the terrible father as a barber’s block, the commonplace daughter as this memorable creature?

“You don’t remember much about her?  No, I suppose not.  She was a quiet girl and nobody noticed her much, even when—­” he paused with a smile—­ “you were all asking Vard to dine.”

I winced.  Yes, it was true—­we had all asked Vard to dine.  It was some comfort to think that fate had made him expiate our weakness.

Lillo put the sketch on the mantel-shelf and drew his arm-chair to the fire.

“It’s cold to-night.  Take another cigar, old man; and some whiskey?  There ought to be a bottle and some glasses in that cupboard behind you… help yourself…”