The Lesson of the Master

It struck his listener that the tremendous talk promised by him at Summersoft had indeed come off, and with a promptitude, a fulness, with which the latter’s young imagination had scarcely reckoned.  His impression fairly shook him and he throbbed with the excitement of such deep soundings and such strange confidences.  He throbbed indeed with the conflict of his feelings—bewilderment and recognition and alarm, enjoyment and protest and assent, all commingled with tenderness (and a kind of shame in the participation) for the sores and bruises exhibited by so fine a creature, and with a sense of the tragic secret nursed under his trappings.  The idea of his, Paul Overt’s, becoming the occasion of such an act of humility made him flush and pant, at the same time that his consciousness was in certain directions too much alive not to swallow—and not intensely to taste—every offered spoonful of the revelation.  It had been his odd fortune to blow upon the deep waters, to make them surge and break in waves of strange eloquence.  But how couldn’t he give out a passionate contradiction of his host’s last extravagance, how couldn’t he enumerate to him the parts of his work he loved, the splendid things he had found in it, beyond the compass of any other writer of the day?  St. George listened a while, courteously; then he said, laying his hand on his visitor’s: “That’s all very well; and if your idea’s to do nothing better there’s no reason you shouldn’t have as many good things as I—as many human and material appendages, as many sons or daughters, a wife with as many gowns, a house with as many servants, a stable with as many horses, a heart with as many aches.”  The Master got up when he had spoken thus—he stood a moment—near the sofa looking down on his agitated pupil.  “Are you possessed of any property?” it occurred to him to ask.

“None to speak of.”

“Oh well then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make a goodish income—if you set about it the right way.  Study me for that—study me well.  You may really have horses.”

Paul sat there some minutes without speaking.  He looked straight before him—he turned over many things.  His friend had wandered away, taking up a parcel of letters from the table where the roll of proofs had lain.  “What was the book Mrs. St. George made you burn—the one she didn’t like?” our young man brought out.

“The book she made me burn—how did you know that?”  The Master looked up from his letters quite without the facial convulsion the pupil had feared.

“I heard her speak of it at Summersoft.”

“Ah yes—she’s proud of it.  I don’t know—it was rather good.”

“What was it about?”

“Let me see.”  And he seemed to make an effort to remember.  “Oh yes—it was about myself.”  Paul gave an irrepressible groan for the disappearance of such a production, and the elder man went on: “Oh but you should write it—you should do me.”  And he pulled up—from the restless motion that had come upon him; his fine smile a generous glare.  “There’s a subject, my boy: no end of stuff in it!”

Again Paul was silent, but it was all tormenting.  “Are there no women who really understand—who can take part in a sacrifice?”

“How can they take part?  They themselves are the sacrifice.  They’re the idol and the altar and the flame.”

“Isn’t there even one who sees further?” Paul continued.

For a moment St. George made no answer; after which, having torn up his letters, he came back to the point all ironic.  “Of course I know the one you mean.  But not even Miss Fancourt.”

“I thought you admired her so much.”

“It’s impossible to admire her more.  Are you in love with her?” St. George asked.

“Yes,” Paul Overt presently said.

“Well then give it up.”

Paul stared.  “Give up my ‘love’?”

“Bless me, no.  Your idea.”  And then as our hero but still gazed: “The one you talked with her about.  The idea of a decent perfection.”

“She’d help it—she’d help it!” the young man cried.

“For about a year—the first year, yes.  After that she’d be as a millstone round its neck.”

Paul frankly wondered.  “Why she has a passion for the real thing, for good work—for everything you and I care for most.”

“‘You and I’ is charming, my dear fellow!” his friend laughed.  “She has it indeed, but she’d have a still greater passion for her children—and very proper too.  She’d insist on everything’s being made comfortable, advantageous, propitious for them.  That isn’t the artist’s business.”

“The artist—the artist!  Isn’t he a man all the same?”

St. George had a grand grimace.  “I mostly think not.  You know as well as I what he has to do: the concentration, the finish, the independence he must strive for from the moment he begins to wish his work really decent.  Ah my young friend, his relation to women, and especially to the one he’s most intimately concerned with, is at the mercy of the damning fact that whereas he can in the nature of things have but one standard, they have about fifty.  That’s what makes them so superior,” St. George amusingly added.  “Fancy an artist with a change of standards as you’d have a change of shirts or of dinner-plates.  To do it—to do it and make it divine—is the only thing he has to think about.  ‘Is it done or not?’ is his only question.  Not ‘Is it done as well as a proper solicitude for my dear little family will allow?’  He has nothing to do with the relative—he has only to do with the absolute; and a dear little family may represent a dozen relatives.”

“Then you don’t allow him the common passions and affections of men?” Paul asked.

“Hasn’t he a passion, an affection, which includes all the rest?  Besides, let him have all the passions he likes—if he only keeps his independence.  He must be able to be poor.”

Paul slowly got up.  “Why then did you advise me to make up to her?”

St. George laid his hand on his shoulder.  “Because she’d make a splendid wife!  And I hadn’t read you then.”

The young man had a strained smile.  “I wish you had left me alone!”

“I didn’t know that that wasn’t good enough for you,” his host returned.

“What a false position, what a condemnation of the artist, that he’s a mere disfranchised monk and can produce his effect only by giving up personal happiness.  What an arraignment of art!” Paul went on with a trembling voice.

“Ah you don’t imagine by chance that I’m defending art?  ‘Arraignment’—I should think so!  Happy the societies in which it hasn’t made its appearance, for from the moment it comes they have a consuming ache, they have an incurable corruption, in their breast.  Most assuredly is the artist in a false position!  But I thought we were taking him for granted.  Pardon me,” St. George continued: “‘Ginistrella’ made me!”

Paul stood looking at the floor—one o’clock struck, in the stillness, from a neighbouring church-tower.  “Do you think she’d ever look at me?” he put to his friend at last.

“Miss Fancourt—as a suitor?  Why shouldn’t I think it?  That’s why I’ve tried to favour you—I’ve had a little chance or two of bettering your opportunity.”

“Forgive my asking you, but do you mean by keeping away yourself?” Paul said with a blush.

“I’m an old idiot—my place isn’t there,” St. George stated gravely.

“I’m nothing yet, I’ve no fortune; and there must be so many others,” his companion pursued.

The Master took this considerably in, but made little of it.  “You’re a gentleman and a man of genius.  I think you might do something.”

“But if I must give that up—the genius?”

“Lots of people, you know, think I’ve kept mine,” St. George wonderfully grinned.

“You’ve a genius for mystification!” Paul declared; but grasping his hand gratefully in attenuation of this judgement.

“Poor dear boy, I do worry you!  But try, try, all the same.  I think your chances are good and you’ll win a great prize.”

Paul held fast the other’s hand a minute; he looked into the strange deep face.  “No, I am an artist—I can’t help it!”

“Ah show it then!” St. George pleadingly broke out.  “Let me see before I die the thing I most want, the thing I yearn for: a life in which the passion—ours—is really intense.  If you can be rare don’t fail of it!  Think what it is—how it counts—how it lives!”

They had moved to the door and he had closed both his hands over his companion’s.  Here they paused again and our hero breathed deep.  “I want to live!”

“In what sense?”

“In the greatest.”

“Well then stick to it—see it through.”

“With your sympathy—your help?”

“Count on that—you’ll be a great figure to me.  Count on my highest appreciation, my devotion.  You’ll give me satisfaction—if that has any weight with you.”  After which, as Paul appeared still to waver, his host added: “Do you remember what you said to me at Summersoft?”

“Something infatuated, no doubt!”

“‘I’ll do anything in the world you tell me.’  You said that.”

“And you hold me to it?”

“Ah what am I?” the Master expressively sighed.

“Lord, what things I shall have to do!” Paul almost moaned as be departed.

VI

“It goes on too much abroad—hang abroad!”  These or something like them had been the Master’s remarkable words in relation to the action of “Ginistrella”; and yet, though they had made a sharp impression on the author of that work, like almost all spoken words from the same source, he a week after the conversation I have noted left England for a long absence and full of brave intentions.  It is not a perversion of the truth to pronounce that encounter the direct cause of his departure.  If the oral utterance of the eminent writer had the privilege of moving him deeply it was especially on his turning it over at leisure, hours and days later, that it appeared to yield him its full meaning and exhibit its extreme importance.  He spent the summer in Switzerland and, having in September begun a new task, determined not to cross the Alps till he should have made a good start.  To this end he returned to a quiet corner he knew well, on the edge of the Lake of Geneva and within sight of the towers of Chillon: a region and a view for which he had an affection that sprang from old associations and was capable of mysterious revivals and refreshments.  Here he lingered late, till the snow was on the nearer hills, almost down to the limit to which he could climb when his stint, on the shortening afternoons, was performed.  The autumn was fine, the lake was blue and his book took form and direction.  These felicities, for the time, embroidered his life, which he suffered to cover him with its mantle.  At the end of six weeks he felt he had learnt St. George’s lesson by heart, had tested and proved its doctrine.  Nevertheless he did a very inconsistent thing: before crossing the Alps he wrote to Marian Fancourt.  He was aware of the perversity of this act, and it was only as a luxury, an amusement, the reward of a strenuous autumn, that he justified it.  She had asked of him no such favour when, shortly before he left London, three days after their dinner in Ennismore Gardens, he went to take leave of her.  It was true she had had no ground—he hadn’t named his intention of absence.  He had kept his counsel for want of due assurance: it was that particular visit that was, the next thing, to settle the matter.  He had paid the visit to see how much he really cared for her, and quick departure, without so much as an explicit farewell, was the sequel to this enquiry, the answer to which had created within him a deep yearning.  When he wrote her from Clarens he noted that he owed her an explanation (more than three months after!) for not having told her what he was doing.

She replied now briefly but promptly, and gave him a striking piece of news: that of the death, a week before, of Mrs. St. George.  This exemplary woman had succumbed, in the country, to a violent attack of inflammation of the lungs—he would remember that for a long time she had been delicate.  Miss Fancourt added that she believed her husband overwhelmed by the blow; he would miss her too terribly—she had been everything in life to him.  Paul Overt, on this, immediately wrote to St. George.  He would from the day of their parting have been glad to remain in communication with him, but had hitherto lacked the right excuse for troubling so busy a man.  Their long nocturnal talk came back to him in every detail, but this was no bar to an expression of proper sympathy with the head of the profession, for hadn’t that very talk made it clear that the late accomplished lady was the influence that ruled his life?  What catastrophe could be more cruel than the extinction of such an influence?  This was to be exactly the tone taken by St. George in answering his young friend upwards of a month later.  He made no allusion of course to their important discussion.  He spoke of his wife as frankly and generously as if he had quite forgotten that occasion, and the feeling of deep bereavement was visible in his words.  “She took everything off my hands—off my mind.  She carried on our life with the greatest art, the rarest devotion, and I was free, as few men can have been, to drive my pen, to shut myself up with my trade.  This was a rare service—the highest she could have rendered me.  Would I could have acknowledged it more fitly!”

A certain bewilderment, for our hero, disengaged itself from these remarks: they struck him as a contradiction, a retractation, strange on the part of a man who hadn’t the excuse of witlessness.  He had certainly not expected his correspondent to rejoice in the death of his wife, and it was perfectly in order that the rupture of a tie of more than twenty years should have left him sore.  But if she had been so clear a blessing what in the name of consistency had the dear man meant by turning him upside down that night—by dosing him to that degree, at the most sensitive hour of his life, with the doctrine of renunciation?  If Mrs. St. George was an irreparable loss, then her husband’s inspired advice had been a bad joke and renunciation was a mistake.  Overt was on the point of rushing back to London to show that, for his part, he was perfectly willing to consider it so, and he went so far as to take the manuscript of the first chapters of his new book out of his table-drawer, to insert it into a pocket of his portmanteau.  This led to his catching a glimpse of certain pages he hadn’t looked at for months, and that accident, in turn, to his being struck with the high promise they revealed—a rare result of such retrospections, which it was his habit to avoid as much as possible: they usually brought home to him that the glow of composition might be a purely subjective and misleading emotion.  On this occasion a certain belief in himself disengaged itself whimsically from the serried erasures of his first draft, making him think it best after all to pursue his present trial to the end.  If he could write as well under the rigour of privation it might be a mistake to change the conditions before that spell had spent itself.  He would go back to London of course, but he would go back only when he should have finished his book.  This was the vow he privately made, restoring his manuscript to the table-drawer.  It may be added that it took him a long time to finish his book, for the subject was as difficult as it was fine, and he was literally embarrassed by the fulness of his notes.  Something within him warned him that he must make it supremely good—otherwise he should lack, as regards his private behaviour, a handsome excuse.  He had a horror of this deficiency and found himself as firm as need be on the question of the lamp and the file.  He crossed the Alps at last and spent the winter, the spring, the ensuing summer, in Italy, where still, at the end of a twelvemonth, his task was unachieved.  “Stick to it—see it through”: this general injunction of St. George’s was good also for the particular case.  He applied it to the utmost, with the result that when in its slow order the summer had come round again he felt he had given all that was in him.  This time he put his papers into his portmanteau, with the address of his publisher attached, and took his way northward.

He had been absent from London for two years—two years which, seeming to count as more, had made such a difference in his own life—through the production of a novel far stronger, he believed, than “Ginistrella”—that he turned out into Piccadilly, the morning after his arrival, with a vague expectation of changes, of finding great things had happened.  But there were few transformations in Piccadilly—only three or four big red houses where there had been low black ones—and the brightness of the end of June peeped through the rusty railings of the Green Park and glittered in the varnish of the rolling carriages as he had seen it in other, more cursory Junes.  It was a greeting he appreciated; it seemed friendly and pointed, added to the exhilaration of his finished book, of his having his own country and the huge oppressive amusing city that suggested everything, that contained everything, under his hand again.  “Stay at home and do things here—do subjects we can measure,” St. George had said; and now it struck him he should ask nothing better than to stay at home for ever.  Late in the afternoon he took his way to Manchester Square, looking out for a number he hadn’t forgotten.  Miss Fancourt, however, was not at home, so that he turned rather dejectedly from the door.  His movement brought him face to face with a gentleman just approaching it and recognised on another glance as Miss Fancourt’s father.  Paul saluted this personage, and the General returned the greeting with his customary good manner—a manner so good, however, that you could never tell whether it meant he placed you.  The disappointed caller felt the impulse to address him; then, hesitating, became both aware of having no particular remark to make, and convinced that though the old soldier remembered him he remembered him wrong.  He therefore went his way without computing the irresistible effect his own evident recognition would have on the General, who never neglected a chance to gossip.  Our young man’s face was expressive, and observation seldom let it pass.  He hadn’t taken ten steps before he heard himself called after with a friendly semi-articulate “Er—I beg your pardon!”  He turned round and the General, smiling at him from the porch, said: “Won’t you come in?  I won’t leave you the advantage of me!”  Paul declined to come in, and then felt regret, for Miss Fancourt, so late in the afternoon, might return at any moment.  But her father gave him no second chance; he appeared mainly to wish not to have struck him as ungracious.  A further look at the visitor had recalled something, enough at least to enable him to say: “You’ve come back, you’ve come back?”  Paul was on the point of replying that he had come back the night before, but he suppressed, the next instant, this strong light on the immediacy of his visit and, giving merely a general assent, alluded to the young lady he deplored not having found.  He had come late in the hope she would be in.  “I’ll tell her—I’ll tell her,” said the old man; and then he added quickly, gallantly: “You’ll be giving us something new?  It’s a long time, isn’t it?”  Now he remembered him right.

“Rather long.  I’m very slow.” Paul explained.  “I met you at Summersoft a long time ago.”

“Oh yes—with Henry St. George.  I remember very well.  Before his poor wife—” General Fancourt paused a moment, smiling a little less.  “I dare say you know.”

“About Mrs. St. George’s death?  Certainly—I heard at the time.”

“Oh no, I mean—I mean he’s to be married.”

“Ah I’ve not heard that!”  But just as Paul was about to add “To whom?” the General crossed his intention.

“When did you come back?  I know you’ve been away—by my daughter.  She was very sorry.  You ought to give her something new.”

“I came back last night,” said our young man, to whom something had occurred which made his speech for the moment a little thick.

“Ah most kind of you to come so soon.  Couldn’t you turn up at dinner?”

“At dinner?” Paul just mechanically repeated, not liking to ask whom St. George was going to marry, but thinking only of that.

“There are several people, I believe.  Certainly St. George.  Or afterwards if you like better.  I believe my daughter expects—”  He appeared to notice something in the visitor’s raised face (on his steps he stood higher) which led him to interrupt himself, and the interruption gave him a momentary sense of awkwardness, from which he sought a quick issue.  “Perhaps then you haven’t heard she’s to be married.”

Paul gaped again.  “To be married?”

“To Mr. St. George—it has just been settled.  Odd marriage, isn’t it?”  Our listener uttered no opinion on this point: he only continued to stare.  “But I dare say it will do—she’s so awfully literary!” said the General.

Paul had turned very red.  “Oh it’s a surprise—very interesting, very charming!  I’m afraid I can’t dine—so many thanks!”

“Well, you must come to the wedding!” cried the General.  “Oh I remember that day at Summersoft.  He’s a great man, you know.”

“Charming—charming!” Paul stammered for retreat.  He shook hands with the General and got off.  His face was red and he had the sense of its growing more and more crimson.  All the evening at home—he went straight to his rooms and remained there dinnerless—his cheek burned at intervals as if it had been smitten.  He didn’t understand what had happened to him, what trick had been played him, what treachery practised.  “None, none,” he said to himself.  “I’ve nothing to do with it.  I’m out of it—it’s none of my business.”  But that bewildered murmur was followed again and again by the incongruous ejaculation: “Was it a plan—was it a plan?”  Sometimes he cried to himself, breathless, “Have I been duped, sold, swindled?”  If at all, he was an absurd, an abject victim.  It was as if he hadn’t lost her till now.  He had renounced her, yes; but that was another affair—that was a closed but not a locked door.  Now he seemed to see the door quite slammed in his face.  Did he expect her to wait—was she to give him his time like that: two years at a stretch?  He didn’t know what he had expected—he only knew what he hadn’t.  It wasn’t this—it wasn’t this.  Mystification bitterness and wrath rose and boiled in him when he thought of the deference, the devotion, the credulity with which he had listened to St. George.  The evening wore on and the light was long; but even when it had darkened he remained without a lamp.  He had flung himself on the sofa, where he lay through the hours with his eyes either closed or gazing at the gloom, in the attitude of a man teaching himself to bear something, to bear having been made a fool of.  He had made it too easy—that idea passed over him like a hot wave.  Suddenly, as he heard eleven o’clock strike, he jumped up, remembering what General Fancourt had said about his coming after dinner.  He’d go—he’d see her at least; perhaps he should see what it meant.  He felt as if some of the elements of a hard sum had been given him and the others were wanting: he couldn’t do his sum till he had got all his figures.

He dressed and drove quickly, so that by half-past eleven he was at Manchester Square.  There were a good many carriages at the door—a party was going on; a circumstance which at the last gave him a slight relief, for now he would rather see her in a crowd.  People passed him on the staircase; they were going away, going “on” with the hunted herdlike movement of London society at night.  But sundry groups remained in the drawing-room, and it was some minutes, as she didn’t hear him announced, before he discovered and spoke to her.  In this short interval he had seen St. George talking to a lady before the fireplace; but he at once looked away, feeling unready for an encounter, and therefore couldn’t be sure the author of “Shadowmere” noticed him.  At all events he didn’t come over though Miss Fancourt did as soon as she saw him—she almost rushed at him, smiling rustling radiant beautiful.  He had forgotten what her head, what her face offered to the sight; she was in white, there were gold figures on her dress and her hair was a casque of gold.  He saw in a single moment that she was happy, happy with an aggressive splendour.  But she wouldn’t speak to him of that, she would speak only of himself.

“I’m so delighted; my father told me.  How kind of you to come!”  She struck him as so fresh and brave, while his eyes moved over her, that he said to himself irresistibly: “Why to him, why not to youth, to strength, to ambition, to a future?  Why, in her rich young force, to failure, to abdication to superannuation?”  In his thought at that sharp moment he blasphemed even against all that had been left of his faith in the peccable Master.  “I’m so sorry I missed you,” she went on.  “My father told me.  How charming of you to have come so soon!”