The Collectors | Page 4

an all-night refuge, closes now at
three--desecration has made it the yellow marble office of a teetotaler
in the banking line--and the Glengyle, that blessed essence of the barley,
heather, peat, and mist of Old Scotland, has been taken over by an
exporting company, limited. Sometimes I think I detect a little of it in
the poisons that the grocers of Glasgow and Edinburgh send over here,
or perhaps I only dream of the old taste. Then it was itself, and by the

second glass Campbell Corot was quite ready to soliloquise. You shall
have his story about as he told it, but abridged a little in view of your
tender ages and the hour.
* * * * *
"John Campbell had grown up contentedly on the old farm under
Mount Everett until one summer when a landscape painter took board
with the family. At first the lad despised the gentle art as unmanly, but
as he watched the mysterious processes he longed to try his hand. The
good-natured Düsseldorfian willingly lent brushes and bits of millboard
upon which John proceeded to make the most lurid confections. The
forms of things were, of course, an obstacle to him, as they are to
everybody. 'I never could drore,' he told me, 'and I never wanted to
drore like that painter chap. Why he'd fill a big canvas with little trees
and rocks and ponds till it all seemed no bigger than a Noah's ark show.
I used to ask him, "Why don't you wait till evening when you can't see
so much to drore?"' To such criticism the painter naturally paid no
attention, while John devoted himself to sunsets and the tube of
crimson lake. From babyhood he had loved the purple hour, and his
results, while without form and void, were apparently not wholly
unpleasing, for his master paid him the compliment of using one or two
such sketches as backgrounds, adding merely the requisite hills, houses,
fences, and cows. These collaborations were mentioned not unworthily
beside the sunsets of Kensett and Cropsey next winter at the Academy.
From that summer John was for better or worse a painter.
"His first local success was, curiously enough, an historical
composition, in which the village hose company, almost swallowed up
by the smoke, held in check a conflagration of Vesuvian magnitude.
The few visible figures and Smith's turning-mill, which had heroically
been saved in part from the flames, were jotted in from photographs.
Happily this work, for which the Alert Hose Company subscribed no
less than twenty-five dollars, providing also a fifty-dollar frame, fell
under the appreciative eye of the insurance adjuster who visited the
very ruins depicted. Recognising immediately an uncommonly
available form of artistic talent, this gentleman procured John a

commission as painter in ordinary to the Vulcan, with orders to come at
once to town at excellent wages. By his twentieth year, then, John was
established in an attic chamber near the North River with a public that,
barring change in the advertising policy of the Vulcan, must inevitably
become national. For the lithographers he designed all manner of
holocausts; at times he made tours through the counties and fixed the
incandescent mouth of Vulcan's forge, the figures within being merely
indicated, on the face of a hundred ledges. That was a shame, he freely
admitted to me; the rocks looked better without. In fact, John
Campbell's first manner soon came to be a humiliation and an
intolerable bondage. He felt the insincerity of it deeply. 'You see, it's
this way,' he explained to me, 'you don't see the shapes by firelight or at
sunset, but you have seen them all day and you know they're there.
Nobody that don't have those shapes in his brush can make you feel
them in a picture. Everybody puts too little droring into sunsets.
Nobody paints good ones, not even Inness [we must remember it was
in the early '70s], except a Frenchman called Roosoo. He takes 'em very
late, which is best, and he can drore some too.'"
"A very decent critic, your alcoholic friend," the Critic remarked. "He
was full of good ideas, as you shall see," the story-teller replied. "I
quite agree with you, if the bad whisky could have been kept away
from him he might have shone in your profession. Anyhow, he had the
makings of an honest man in him, and when the Vulcan enlarged its
cliff-painting programme, he cut loose bravely. Then followed ten lean
years of odd jobs, with landscape painting as a recreation, and the
occasional sale of a canvas on a street corner as a great event. When his
need was greatest he consented to earn good wages composing
symbolical door designs for the Meteor Coach Company, but that again
he could not