FullReads

“To sink your shaft deep and polish the plate through which people look into it–that’s what your work consists of,” I remember ingeniously observing.

“Ah polishing one’s plate–that’s the torment of execution!” he exclaimed, jerking himself up and sitting forward. “The effort to arrive at a surface, if you think anything of that decent sort necessary–some people don’t, happily for them! My dear fellow, if you could see the surface I dream of as compared with the one with which I’ve to content myself. Life’s really too short for art–one hasn’t time to make one’s shell ideally hard. Firm and bright, firm and bright is very well to say–the devilish thing has a way sometimes of being bright, and even of being hard, as mere tough frozen pudding is hard, without being firm. When I rap it with my knuckles it doesn’t give the right sound. There are horrible sandy stretches where I’ve taken the wrong turn because I couldn’t for the life of me find the right. If you knew what a dunce I am sometimes! Such things figure to me now base pimples and ulcers on the brow of beauty!”

“They’re very bad, very bad,” I said as gravely as I could.

“Very bad? They’re the highest social offence I know; it ought–it absolutely ought; I’m quite serious–to be capital. If I knew I should be publicly thrashed else I’d manage to find the true word. The people who can’t–some of them don’t so much as know it when they see it–would shut their inkstands, and we shouldn’t be deluged by this flood of rubbish!”

I shall not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, nor to explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company, Mark Ambient revealed to me more and more the consistency of his creative spirit, the spirit in him that felt all life as plastic material. I could but envy him the force of that passion, and it was at any rate through the receipt of this impression that by the time we returned I had gained the sense of intimacy with him that I have noted. Before we got up for the homeward stretch he alluded to his wife’s having once–or perhaps more than once–asked him whether he should like Dolcino to read “Beltraffio.” He must have been unaware at the moment of all that this conveyed to me–as well doubtless of my extreme curiosity to hear what he had replied. He had said how much he hoped Dolcino would read ALL his works–when he was twenty; he should like him to know what his father had done. Before twenty it would be useless; he wouldn’t understand them.

“And meanwhile do you propose to hide them–to lock them up in a drawer?” Mrs. Ambient had proceeded.

“Oh no–we must simply tell him they’re not intended for small boys. If you bring him up properly after that he won’t touch them.”

To this Mrs. Ambient had made answer that it might be very awkward when he was about fifteen, say; and I asked her husband if it were his opinion in general, then, that young people shouldn’t read novels.

“Good ones–certainly not!” said my companion. I suppose I had had other views, for I remember saying that for myself I wasn’t sure it was bad for them if the novels were “good” to the right intensity of goodness. “Bad for THEM, I don’t say so much!” my companion returned. “But very bad, I’m afraid, for the poor dear old novel itself.” That oblique accidental allusion to his wife’s attitude was followed by a greater breadth of reference as we walked home. “The difference between us is simply the opposition between two distinct ways of looking at the world, which have never succeeded in getting on together, or in making any kind of common household, since the beginning of time. They’ve borne all sorts of names, and my wife would tell you it’s the difference between Christian and Pagan. I may be a pagan, but I don’t like the name; it sounds sectarian. She thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek. It’s the difference between making the most of life and making the least, so that you’ll get another better one in some other time and place. Will it be a sin to make the most of that one, too, I wonder; and shall we have to be bribed off in the future state as well as in the present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty–I don’t know, I doubt if a poor devil CAN; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it. My wife holds that we shouldn’t cultivate or enjoy it without extraordinary precautions and reserves. She’s always afraid of it, always on her guard. I don’t know what it can ever have done to her, what grudge it owes her or what resentment rides. And she’s so pretty, too, herself! Don’t you think she’s lovely? She was at any rate when we married. At that time I wasn’t aware of that difference I speak of– I thought it all came to the same thing: in the end, as they say. Well, perhaps it will in the end. I don’t know what the end will be. Moreover, I care for seeing things as they are; that’s the way I try to show them in any professed picture. But you mustn’t talk to Mrs. Ambient about things as they are. She has a mortal dread of things as they are.”