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<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2> <h2>THE LOST MASTER</h2> "What's become of Waring since he gave us all the slip?" was quoted by a man at the Painters' Club the other night. What made him think of Browning, he blandly explained to the two or three chaps sitting at his table on the terrace, was not the terrific heat, but the line swam across his memory when he recalled the name of Albertus Magnus as a green meteor seen for a moment far out at sea drops into the watery void. "Who, in the name of Apollo, is Albertus Magnus?" was asked. The painter sat up. "There you are, you fellows!" he roared. "You all paint or write or spoil marble, but for the history of your art you don't care a rap." "Yes, but what has your Albertus Thingamajig to do with Browning's Waring?" "Only this," was the grumbling reply; "it is a similar case." "A story, a story!" we all cried, and settled down for a yarn; but no yarn was spun. The painter relapsed into silence, and the group gradually dissolved. We sat still, hoping against hope. "See here," we expostulated, "really you should not arouse expectations, and then evade the logical conclusions. It's not fair." "I [Pg 162] didn't care to explain to those other fellows," was the reply. "They are too cynical for my taste. They go to the holy of holies of art to pray, and come away to scoff. Materialism, rather realism, as you call it, is the canker of modern art. Suppose I told you that here, now, in this noisy Tophet of New York, there lives a man of genius, who paints like a belated painter of the Renaissance? Suppose I said that I could show you his work, would you think I was crazy?" He paused. "A young genius, poor, unknown? Oh, lead us to him, Sir Painter, and we shall call you blest!" "He is not young, and, while the great public and the little dealers have not heard of him, he has a band of admirers, rich men leagued in a conspiracy of silence, who buy his pictures, though they don't show them to the critics." We reiterated our request: "Lead us to him!" Without noticing our importunities, he continued: "He paints for the sake of beautiful paint; he paints as did Hokusai, the Old-Man-Mad-for-Painting, or like Frenhofer, the hero in Balzac's story, The Unknown Masterpiece! He is more like Balzac's Frenhofer—is that the chap's name?—than Browning's Waring. He is the lost master, a Frenhofer who has conquered, for he has a hundred masterpieces stored away in his studio." "Lost master?" we stuttered; "a hundred masterpieces that have never been shown to critic or public? Oh! 'Never star was lost here but it [Pg 163] rose afar.'" "Yes, and he quotes Browning by the yard, for he was a close friend of the poet, and of his best critic, Nettleship, the animal painter, now dead." "Won't you tell his story connectedly, and put us out of our agony?" we pleaded. "No," he answered; "I'll do better. I'll take you to his studio." The evening ended in a blaze of fireworks. The afternoon following we found ourselves in Greenwich Village, in front of a row of old-fashioned cottages covered with honeysuckle. You may recall the avenue and this particular block that has thus far resisted the temptation to become either lofty apartment or business palace. But the painter met us here, and conducted us westward until we reached a warehouse—gloomy, in need of repair, yet solid, despite the teeth of time. We entered the wagonway, traversed a dirty court, mounted a dark staircase, and paused before a low door. "Do you knock," we were admonished, and at once did so. Approaching footsteps. A rattling and grating of rusty bolts and keys. The door was slowly opened. A big hairy head appeared. The eyes set in this halo of white hair were positively the most magnificent I had ever seen sparkle and glow in a human countenance. If a lion were capable of being at once poet and prophet and exalted animal, his eyes would have possessed something of the glance of this stranger. We turned anxiously to to our friend. He had disappeared. What a [Pg 164] trick to play at such a moment. "Who do you wish?" rumbled a mellow voice. "Albertus Magnus?" we timidly inquired, expecting to be pitched down the stairs the next minute. "Ah!" was the reply. Silence. Then, "Come in, please; don't stumble over the canvases." We followed the old man, whose stature was not as heroic as his head; and we did not fail to stumble, for the way was obscure, and paved with empty frames, canvases, and a litter of bottles, paint-tubes, easels, rugs, carpets, wretched furniture, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of an old-style studio. We were not sorry when we came into open space and light. We were in the room that doubtless concealed the lost masterpieces, and there, blithely smoking a cigarette, sat our guide, the painter. He had entered by another door, he explained; and, without noticing our discontented air, he introduced us to the man of the house. In sheer daylight he looked younger, though his years must have bordered upon the biblical threescore and ten. But the soul, the brain that came out of his wonderful eyes, were as young as to-morrow. "Isn't he a corker?" irreverently demanded our friend. "He is not even as old as he looks. He doesn't eat vegetables, when thirsty he drinks anything he can get, and smokes day and night. And yet he calls himself an idealist." The old painter smiled. "I suppose I have been described as Waring to you, because I [Pg 165] knew Robert Browning. I did vanish from the sight of my friends for years, but only in the attempt to conquer paint, not to achieve money or kingship, like the original Alfred Domett, called Waring in the poem. But when I returned from Italy I was a stranger in a strange land. No one remembered me. I had last seen Elihu Vedder at Capri. Worst of all, I had forgotten that with time fashions change in art as in dress, and nowadays no one understands me, and, with the exception of Arthur Davies, I understand no one. I come from the Venetians, Davies from the early Florentines; his line is as beautiful as Pollajuolo. I love gold more than did <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Facino Cano" id="tnote15">Facino Cane</ins> of Balzac. Gold, ah! luscious gold, the lost secret of the masters. Tell me, do you love Titian?" We swore allegiance to the memory of Titian. The artist seemed pleased. "You younger men are devoted to Velasquez and Hals—too much so. Great as painters, possibly greatest among painters, their souls never broke away from the soil like runaway balloons. They miss height and depth. Their colour never sings like Titian's. They surprise secrets in the eyes of their sitters, but never the secret surprised by the Italian. I sat at his feet, before his canvases, fifty years, and I'm further away than ever—" Our friend interrupted this rhapsody. "Look here, Albertus, you man with a name out of Thomas Aquinas, don't you think you are playing on your visitors' nerves, just to [Pg 166] set them on edge with expectancy? I've heard this choral service for the glorification of Titian more than once, and I've inevitably noticed that you had a trump of your own up your sleeve. You love Titian. Well, admit it. You don't paint like him, your colour scheme is something else, and what you are after you only know yourself. Come! trot out your Phantom Ship or The Cascade of Gold, or, better still, that landscape with a river-bank and shepherds." The old man gravely bowed. Then he manipulated the light, placed a big easel in proper position, fumbled among the canvases that made the room smaller, secured one and placed it before us. We drew a long breath. "Richard Wagner, not Captain Maryatt, was the inspiration," murmured the master. The tormented vessel stormed down the picture, every inch of sail bellying out in a wind that blew a gale infernal beneath the rays, so it seemed to us, of a poisonous golden moon. The water was massive and rhythmic. In the first plane a smaller ship does not even attempt to tack. You anticipate the speedy crackling and smashing when the Flying Dutchman rides over her; but it never happens. Like the moonshine, the phantom ship may melt into air-bubbles before it reaches the other boat. No figures are shown. Nevertheless, as we studied the picture we fancied that we discerned the restless soul of Vanderdecken [Pg 167] pacing his quarter-deck, cursing the elements, or longing for some far-away Senta. A poetic composition handled with masterly evasiveness, the colour was the strangest part of it. Where had Albertus caught the secret of that flowing gold, potable gold; gold that threateningly blazed in the storm wrack, gold as lyric as sunshine in spring! And why such sinister gold in a moonlit sea? We suspected illusion. My friend, the painter, laughed: "Aha! you are looking for the sun, and is it only a moon overhead? Our conjurer here has a few tricks. Know then, credulous one, that the moon yonder is really the sun. Seek the reason for that suffused back sky, realise that the solar photosphere in a mist is precisely the breeder of all this magic gold you so envy." "Yes," we exclaimed, "but the motion of it all, the grip! Only Turner—" We were interrupted by a friendly slap on the back. "Now, you are talking sense," said our friend. "Turner, a new Turner, who has heard the music of Wagner and read the magic prose of Joseph Conrad." What followed we shall not pretend to describe. Landscapes of old ivory and pearly greys; portraits, in which varnish modulated with colours of a gamut of intensity that set tingling the eyeballs, and played a series of tonal variations in the thick of which the theme was lost, hinted at, emerged triumphantly, and at the end vanished in the glorious arabesque; then followed apocalyptic visions, [Pg 168] in which the solid earth staggered through the empyrean after a black sun—a magnetic disk doomed by a mighty voice that cried aloud: "It is accomplished." Pastorals as ravishing as Giorgione's, with nuances of gold undreamed of since the yellow flecks in the robes of Rembrandt, faced us. Our very souls centred in our eyes; but, uncritical as was our mood in the presence of all this imaginative art, we could not help noting that it was without a single trait of the modern. Both in theme and treatment these pictures might have been painted at the time of the Renaissance. The varnish was as wonderful as that on the belly of a Stradivarius fiddle. The blues were of a celestial quality to be found in Titian or Vermeer; the resonant browns, the whites—ah! such exquisite whites, "plus blanche que la plus blanche hermine"—the rich blacks, sonorous reds and yellows—what were all these but secrets recovered from the old masters. The subjects were mainly legendary or mythological; no discordant note of "modernity" obtruded its ugly self. We were in the presence of something as rare as a lyric by Shelley or the playing of <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: Frederic Chopin" id="tnote16">Frédéric Chopin</ins>. What! Why! How! we felt like asking all at once, but Albertus Magnus only smiled, and we choked our emotion. Why had he never exhibited at the Academy or at a special show? Our friend saw our embarrassment, and shielded us by blurting out: "No! he never [Pg 169] exhibited, this obstinate Albertus. He never will. He makes more money than he needs, and will leave it to some cat asylum, for he is a hardened bachelor. Women do not interest him. You won't find one female head in all this amazing collection. Nor has the dear old Diogenes suffered from a love-affair. His only love is his paint. His one weakness is a selfish, a miserly desire to keep all this beautiful paint for himself. Balzac would have delighted to analyse such a peculiar mania. Degas is amiability itself compared with this curmudgeon of genius. Now, don't stop me, Albertus—" "But I must," expostulated the painter. "I am always glad to receive visitors here if they are not dealers or persons ignorant of art, or those who think the moderns can paint. Yet no one comes to see me. My chattering friend here occasionally asks them, and he is a hoaxer. While I go nowhere—I haven't been east of Ninth Avenue for years. What shall I do?" "Paint!" was the curt answer of our friend, as we took our leave. In New York, now, a painter of genius who is known to few! Extraordinary! Is his name really Albertus Magnus, or is that only Latin for Albert Ryder? Our friend shrugged his shoulders and smiled mysteriously. We hate tomfoolery. "Be frank!" we adjured him. He hummed: "In Vishnu land what avatar?" "More Browning!" we sneered. Then we crossed over to the club and talked [Pg 170] art far into the night. Also wet our clay. And Albertus Magnus, will he never come from his paint cave and reveal to the world his masterpieces? Perhaps. Who knows? As the Russians say—Avos! <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 171] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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