Part 14

“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.