II — ART IN FICTION

Fiction about art and artists is rare—­that is, good fiction, not the stuff ground out daily by the publishing mills for the gallery-gods.  It is to France that we must look for the classic novel dealing with painters and their painting, Manette Salomon, by Goncourt.  Henry James has written several delightful tales, such as The Liar, The Real Thing, The Tragic Muse, in which artists appear.  But it is the particular psychological problem involved rather than theories of art or personalities that steer Mr. James’s cunning pen.  We all remember the woman who destroyed a portrait of her husband which seemed to reveal his moral secret.  John S. Sargeant has been credited with being the psychologist of the brush in this story.  There is a nice, fresh young fellow in The Tragic Muse, who, weak-spined as he is, prefers at the last his painting to Julia Dallow and a political career.  In The Real Thing we recognise one of those unerring strokes that prove James to be the master psychologist among English writers.  Any discerning painter realises the value of a model who can take the pose that will give him the pictorial idea, the suggestiveness of the pose, not an attempt at crude naturalism.  With this thesis the novelist has built up an amusing, semi-pathetic, and striking fable.

There are painters scattered through English fiction—­can we ever forget Thackeray!  Ouida has not missed weaving her Tyrian purples into the exalted pattern of her romantic painters.  And George Eliot.  And Disraeli.  And Bernard Shaw—­there is a painting creature in Love Among the Artists.  George Moore, however, has devoted more of his pages to paint and painters than any other of the latter-day writers.  The reason is this:  George Moore went to Paris to study art and he drifted into the Julian atelier like any other likely young fellow with hazy notions about art and a well-filled purse.  But these early experiences were not lost.  They cropped up in many of his stories and studies.  He became the critical pioneer of the impressionistic movement and first told London about Manet, Monet, Degas.  He even—­in an article remarkable for critical acumen—­declared that if Jimmy Whistler had been a heavier man, a man of beef, brawn, and beer, like Rubens, he would have been as great a painter as Velasquez.  To the weighing scales, fellow-artists! retorted Whistler; yet the bolt did not miss the mark.  Whistler’s remarks about Mr. Moore, especially after the Eden lawsuit, were, so it is reported, not fit to print.

In Mr. Moore’s first volume of the half-forgotten trilogy, Spring Days, we see a young painter who, it may be said, thinks more of petticoats than paint.  There is paint talk in Mike Fletcher, Moore’s most virile book.  In A Modern Lover the hero is an artist who succeeds in the fashionable world by painting pretty, artificial portraits and faded classical allegories, thereby winning the love of women, much