Chapter XLII

by William Somerset Maugham

　　I did not know why Strickland had suddenly offered to showthem to me. I welcomed the opportunity. A man's work reveals him.In social intercourse he gives you the surface that hewishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a trueknowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of whichhe is unconscious, and from fleeting expressions, which crosshis face unknown to him. Sometimes people carry to suchperfection the mask they have assumed that in due course theyactually become the person they seem. But in his book or hispicture the real man delivers himself defenceless.His pretentiousness will only expose his vacuity. The lathepainted to look like iron is seen to be but a lathe.No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind.To the acute observer no one can produce the most casual workwithout disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.As I walked up the endless stairs of the house in whichStrickland lived, I confess that I was a little excited.It seemed to me that I was on the threshold of a surprisingadventure. I looked about the room with curiosity. It waseven smaller and more bare than I remembered it. I wonderedwhat those friends of mine would say who demanded vaststudios, and vowed they could not work unless all theconditions were to their liking."You'd better stand there," he said, pointing to a spot fromwhich, presumably, he fancied I could see to best advantagewhat he had to show me."You don't want me to talk, I suppose," I said."No, blast you; I want you to hold your tongue."He placed a picture on the easel, and let me look at it for aminute or two; then took it down and put another in its place.I think he showed me about thirty canvases. It was the resultof the six years during which he had been painting. He hadnever sold a picture. The canvases were of different sizes.The smaller were pictures of still-life and the largest werelandscapes. There were about half a dozen portraits."That is the lot," he said at last.I wish I could say that I recognised at once their beauty andtheir great originality. Now that I have seen many of themagain and the rest are familiar to me in reproductions, I amastonished that at first sight I was bitterly disappointed.I felt nothing of the peculiar thrill which it is the propertyof art to give. The impression that Strickland's picturesgave me was disconcerting; and the fact remains, always toreproach me, that I never even thought of buying any.I missed a wonderful chance. Most of them have found their wayinto museums, and the rest are the treasured possessions ofwealthy amateurs. I try to find excuses for myself. I thinkthat my taste is good, but I am conscious that it has no originality.I know very little about painting, and I wanderalong trails that others have blazed for me. At that time Ihad the greatest admiration for the impressionists. I longedto possess a Sisley and a Degas, and I worshipped Manet.His Olympia seemed to me the greatest picture of modern times,and Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe moved me profoundly.These works seemed to me the last word in painting.I will not describe the pictures that Strickland showed me.Descriptions of pictures are always dull, and these, besides,are familiar to all who take an interest in such things. Nowthat his influence has so enormously affected modern painting,now that others have charted the country which he was amongthe first to explore, Strickland's pictures, seen for thefirst time, would find the mind more prepared for them; but itmust be remembered that I had never seen anything of the sort.First of all I was taken aback by what seemed to me theclumsiness of his technique. Accustomed to the drawing of theold masters, and convinced that Ingres was the greatestdraughtsman of recent times, I thought that Strickland drewvery badly. I knew nothing of the simplification at which he aimed.I remember a still-life of oranges on a plate, and Iwas bothered because the plate was not round and the orangeswere lop-sided. The portraits were a little larger thanlife-size, and this gave them an ungainly look. To my eyes thefaces looked like caricatures. They were painted in a waythat was entirely new to me. The landscapes puzzled me even more.There were two or three pictures of the forest atFontainebleau and several of streets in Paris: my first feelingwas that they might have been painted by a drunken cabdriver.I was perfectly bewildered. The colour seemed tome extraordinarily crude. It passed through my mind that thewhole thing was a stupendous, incomprehensible farce.Now that I look back I am more than ever impressed byStroeve's acuteness. He saw from the first that here was arevolution in art, and he recognised in its beginnings thegenius which now all the world allows.But if I was puzzled and disconcerted, I was not unimpressed.Even I, in my colossal ignorance, could not but feel thathere, trying to express itself, was real power. I was excitedand interested. I felt that these pictures had something tosay to me that was very important for me to know, but I couldnot tell what it was. They seemed to me ugly, but theysuggested without disclosing a secret of momentoussignificance. They were strangely tantalising. They gave mean emotion that I could not analyse. They said something thatwords were powerless to utter. I fancy that Strickland sawvaguely some spiritual meaning in material things that was sostrange that he could only suggest it with halting symbols.It was as though he found in the chaos of the universe a newpattern, and were attempting clumsily, with anguish of soul,to set it down. I saw a tormented spirit striving for therelease of expression.I turned to him."I wonder if you haven't mistaken your medium," I said."What the hell do you mean?""I think you're trying to say something, I don't quite knowwhat it is, but I'm not sure that the best way of saying it isby means of painting."When I imagined that on seeing his pictures I should get aclue to the understanding of his strange character I wasmistaken. They merely increased the astonishment with whichhe filled me. I was more at sea than ever. The only thingthat seemed clear to me -- and perhaps even this was fanciful-- was that he was passionately striving for liberation fromsome power that held him. But what the power was and whatline the liberation would take remained obscure. Each one ofus is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, andcan communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signshave no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain.We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasuresof our heart, but they have not the power to accept them,and so we go lonely, side by side but not together,unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are likepeople living in a country whose language they know so little that,with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say,they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual.Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can onlytell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.The final impression I received was of a prodigious effort toexpress some state of the soul, and in this effort, I fancied,must be sought the explanation of what so utterly perplexed me.It was evident that colours and forms had a significancefor Strickland that was peculiar to himself. He was under anintolerable necessity to convey something that he felt, and hecreated them with that intention alone. He did not hesitateto simplify or to distort if he could get nearer to thatunknown thing he sought. Facts were nothing to him, forbeneath the mass of irrelevant incidents he looked forsomething significant to himself. It was as though he hadbecome aware of the soul of the universe and were compelled toexpress it.Though these pictures confused and puzzled me, I could not beunmoved by the emotion that was patent in them; and, I knewnot why, I felt in myself a feeling that with regard toStrickland was the last I had ever expected to experience.I felt an overwhelming compassion."I think I know now why you surrendered to your feeling forBlanche Stroeve," I said to him."Why?""I think your courage failed. The weakness of your bodycommunicated itself to your soul. I do not know what infiniteyearning possesses you, so that you are driven to a perilous,lonely search for some goal where you expect to find a finalrelease from the spirit that torments you. I see you as theeternal pilgrim to some shrine that perhaps does not exist.I do not know to what inscrutable Nirvana you aim. Do you knowyourself? Perhaps it is Truth and Freedom that you seek, andfor a moment you thought that you might find release in Love.I think your tired soul sought rest in a woman's arms, andwhen you found no rest there you hated her. You had no pityfor her, because you have no pity for yourself. And youkilled her out of fear, because you trembled still at thedanger you had barely escaped."He smiled dryly and pulled his beard."You are a dreadful sentimentalist, my poor friend."A week later I heard by chance that Strickland had gone toMarseilles. I never saw him again.