Antic Hay - Aldous Huxley (the red fox clan .txt) 📗

He began to talk about his books, his poems and pictures; all the great things in his head, the things he had already done. He talked about his exhibition⁠—ah, by God, that would astonish them, that would bowl them over, this time. The blood mounted to his face; there was a flush over the high projecting cheekbones. He could feel the warm blood behind his eyes. He laughed aloud; he was a laughing lion. He stretched out his arms; he was enormous, his arms reached out like the branches of a cedar. The Artist walked across the world and the mangy dogs ran yelping and snapping behind him. The great wind blew and blew, driving him on; it lifted him and he began to fly.

Mrs. Viveash listened. It didn’t look as though he would get much further with the portrait.

It was Press Day. The critics had begun to arrive; Mr. Albemarle circulated among them with a ducal amiability. The young assistant hovered vaguely about, straining to hear what the great men had to say and trying to pretend that he wasn’t eavesdropping. Lypiatt’s pictures hung on the walls, and Lypiatt’s catalogue, thick with its preface and its explanatory notes, was in all hands.

“Very strong,” Mr. Albemarle kept repeating, “very strong indeed!” It was his password for the day.

Little Mr. Clew, who represented the Daily Post, was inclined to be enthusiastic. “How well he writes!” he said to Mr. Albemarle, looking up from the catalogue. “And how well he paints! What impasto.”

Impasto, impasto⁠—the young assistant sidled off unobtrusively to the desk and made a note of it. He would look the word up in Grubb’s Dictionary of Art and Artists later on. He made his way back, circuitously and as though by accident, into Mr. Clew’s neighbourhood.

Mr. Clew was one of those rare people who have a real passion for art. He loved painting, all painting, indiscriminately. In a picture gallery he was like a Turk in a harem; he adored them all. He loved Memling as much as Raphael, he loved Grünewald and Michelangelo, Holman Hunt and Manet, Romney and Tintoretto; how happy he could be with all of them! Sometimes, it is true, he hated; but that was only when familiarity had not yet bred love. At the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, for example, in 1911, he had taken a very firm stand. “This is an obscene farce,” he had written then. Now, however, there was no more passionate admirer of Matisse’s genius. As a connoisseur and kunstforscher, Mr. Clew was much esteemed. People would bring him dirty old pictures to look at, and he would exclaim at once: Why, it’s an El Greco, a Piazetta, or some other suitable name. Asked how he knew, he would shrug his shoulders and say: But it’s signed all over. His certainty and his enthusiasm were infectious. Since the coming of El Greco into fashion, he had discovered dozens of early works by that great artist. For Lord Petersfield’s collection alone he had found four early El Grecos, all by pupils of Bassano. Lord Petersfield’s confidence in Mr. Clew was unbounded; not even that affair of the Primitives had shaken it. It was a sad affair: Lord Petersfield’s Duccio had shown signs of cracking; the estate carpenter was sent for to take a look at the panel; he had looked. “A worse-seasoned piece of Illinois hickory,” he said, “I’ve never seen.” After that he looked at the Simone Martini; for that, on the contrary, he was full of praise. Smooth-grained, well-seasoned⁠—it wouldn’t crack, no, not in a hundred years. “A nicer slice of board never came out of America.” He had a hyperbolical way of speaking. Lord Petersfield was extremely angry; he dismissed the estate carpenter on the spot. After that he told Mr. Clew that he wanted a Giorgione, and Mr. Clew went out and found him one which was signed all over.

“I like this very much,” said Mr. Clew, pointing to one of the thoughts with which Lypiatt had prefaced his catalogue. “ ‘Genius,’ ” he adjusted his spectacles and began to read aloud, “ ‘is life. Genius is a force of nature. In art, nothing else counts. The modern impotents, who are afraid of genius and who are envious of it, have invented in self-defence the notion of the Artist. The Artist with his sense of form, his style, his devotion to pure beauty, et cetera, et cetera. But Genius includes the Artist; every Genius has, among very many others, the qualities attributed by the impotents to the Artist. The Artist without genius is a carver of fountains through which no water flows.’ Very true,” said Mr. Clew, “very true indeed.” He marked the passage with his pencil.

Mr. Albemarle produced the password. “Very strongly put,” he said.

“I have always felt that myself,” said Mr. Clew. “El Greco, for example.⁠ ⁠…”

“Good morning, what about El Greco?” said a voice, all in one breath. The thin, long, skin-covered skeleton of Mr. Mallard hung over them like a guilty conscience. Mr. Mallard wrote every week in the Hebdomadal Digest. He had an immense knowledge of art, and a sincere dislike of all that was beautiful. The only modern painter whom he really admired was Hodler. All others were treated by him with a merciless savagery; he tore them to pieces in his weekly articles with all the holy gusto of a Calvinist iconoclast smashing images of the Virgin.

“What about El Greco?” he repeated. He had a peculiarly passionate loathing of El Greco.

Mr. Clew smiled up at him propitiatingly; he was afraid of Mr. Mallard. His enthusiasms were no match for Mr. Mallard’s erudite and logical disgusts. “I was merely quoting him as an example,” he said.

“An example, I hope, of incompetent drawing, baroque composition, disgusting forms, garish colouring and hysterical subject-matter.” Mr. Mallard showed his old ivory teeth in a menacing smile. “Those are the only things which El Greco’s work exemplifies.”

Mr. Clew gave a nervous little laugh. “What do you think of these?” he asked, pointing to Lypiatt’s canvases.

“They look to me