"The right breast be damned," shouted Lawson. "The whole thing's a miracle of painting."
He began to describe in detail the beauties of the picture, but at this table at Gravier's they who spoke at length spoke for their own edification.
No one listened to him.
The American interrupted angrily.
"You don't mean to say you think the head's good?"
Lawson, white with passion now, began to defend the head; but Clutton, who had been sitting in silence with a look on his face of good-humoured scorn, broke in.
"Give him the head.
We don't want the head.
It doesn't affect the picture."
"All right, I'll give you the head," cried Lawson. "Take the head and be damned to you."
"What about the black line?" cried the American, triumphantly pushing back a wisp of hair which nearly fell in his soup. "You don't see a black line round objects in nature."
"Oh, God, send down fire from heaven to consume the blasphemer," said Lawson. "What has nature got to do with it?
No one knows what's in nature and what isn't!
The world sees nature through the eyes of the artist.
Why, for centuries it saw horses jumping a fence with all their legs extended, and by Heaven, sir, they were extended.
It saw shadows black until Monet discovered they were coloured, and by Heaven, sir, they were black.
If we choose to surround objects with a black line, the world will see the black line, and there will be a black line; and if we paint grass red and cows blue, it'll see them red and blue, and, by Heaven, they will be red and blue."
"To hell with art," murmured Flanagan. "I want to get ginny."
Lawson took no notice of the interruption.
"Now look here, when Olympia was shown at the Salon, Zola—amid the jeers of the Philistines and the hisses of the pompiers, the academicians, and the public, Zola said:
'I look forward to the day when Manet's picture will hang in the Louvre opposite the Odalisque of Ingres, and it will not be the Odalisque which will gain by comparison.'
It'll be there.
Every day I see the time grow nearer.
In ten years the Olympia will be in the Louvre."
"Never," shouted the American, using both hands now with a sudden desperate attempt to get his hair once for all out of the way. "In ten years that picture will be dead.
It's only a fashion of the moment.
No picture can live that hasn't got something which that picture misses by a million miles."
"And what is that?"
"Great art can't exist without a moral element."
"Oh God!" cried Lawson furiously. "I knew it was that.
He wants morality."
He joined his hands and held them towards heaven in supplication. "Oh, Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus, what did you do when you discovered America?"
"Ruskin says…"
But before he could add another word, Clutton rapped with the handle of his knife imperiously on the table.
"Gentlemen," he said in a stern voice, and his huge nose positively wrinkled with passion, "a name has been mentioned which I never thought to hear again in decent society.
Freedom of speech is all very well, but we must observe the limits of common propriety.
You may talk of Bouguereau if you will: there is a cheerful disgustingness in the sound which excites laughter; but let us not sully our chaste lips with the names of J. Ruskin, G. F. Watts, or E. B. Jones."
"Who was Ruskin anyway?" asked Flanagan.
"He was one of the Great Victorians.
He was a master of English style."
"Ruskin's style—a thing of shreds and purple patches," said Lawson. "Besides, damn the Great Victorians.
Whenever I open a paper and see Death of a Great Victorian, I thank Heaven there's one more of them gone.
Their only talent was longevity, and no artist should be allowed to live after he's forty; by then a man has done his best work, all he does after that is repetition.
Don't you think it was the greatest luck in the world for them that Keats, Shelley, Bonnington, and Byron died early?
What a genius we should think Swinburne if he had perished on the day the first series of Poems and Ballads was published!"
The suggestion pleased, for no one at the table was more than twenty-four, and they threw themselves upon it with gusto.
They were unanimous for once.
They elaborated.
Someone proposed a vast bonfire made out of the works of the Forty Academicians into which the Great Victorians might be hurled on their fortieth birthday.
The idea was received with acclamation.