This Mortal Coil | Page 5

too, do it in time on Parnassus?"
Relf smiled dubiously, and knocked the ashes off his cigar into a Japanese tray that stood by his side. "Then you look upon poetry merely as an ultimate means of making money?" he suggested, with a deprecatory look.
"Money! Not money only, my dear fellow, but position, reputation, recognition, honor. Does any man work for anything else? Any man, I mean, but cobblers and enthusiasts?"
"Well, I don't know. I may be an enthusiast myself," Relf answered slowly; "but I certainly do work at art to a great extent for art's sake, because I really love and admire and delight in it. Of course I should like to make money too, within reasonable limits enough to keep myself and my people in a modest sort of way, without the footman or the eligible family residence. Not that I want to be successful, either: from what I've seen of successful men, I incline to believe that success as a rule has a very degenerating effect upon character. Literature, science, and art thrive best in a breezy, bracing air. I never aim at being a successful man myself; and! if I go on as I'm doing now, I shall no doubt succeed in not succeeding. But apart from the money and the livelihood altogether, I love my work as an occupation. I like doing it; and I like to see myself growing stronger and freer at it every day."
"That's all very well for you," Massinger replied, with another expansive wave of his graceful hand. "You're doing work you care for, as I play lawn-tennis, for a personal amusement. I can sympathize with you there. I once felt the same about poetry myself. But that w r as a long time ago: those days are dead hopelessly dead, as dead as Mad Margaret's affidavit. I'm a skeptic now: my faith in verse has evaporated utterly. Have I not seen the public devour ten successive editions of the 'Epic of Washerwomen,' or something of the sort? Have I not seen them reject the good and cleave unto the evil, like the children of Israel wandering in the Wilderness? I know now that the world is hollow, and that my doll is stuffed with sawdust. Let's quit the subject. It turns me always into a gloomy pessimist. What are you going to do with yourself this summer?"
"Me? Oh, just the usual thing, I suppose. Going down in my tub to paint sweet mudbanks off the coast of Suffolk."
"Suffolk to wit! I see the finger of fate in that! Why, that's where I'm going too. I mean to take six or eight weeks' holiday, if a poor drudge of a journalist can ever be said to indulge in holidays at all with books for review, and proofs for correction, and editorial communications for consideration, always weighing like a ton of lead upon this unhappy breast: and I promise to bury myself alive up to the chin in some obscure, out-of-theway Suffolk village they call Whitestrand. Have you ever heard of it?"
"Oh, I know it well," Relf answered, with a smile of delightful reminiscence. ''It's grand for mud. I go there painting again and again. You'd call it the funniest little stranded old-world village you ever came across anywhere in England. Nothing could be uglier, quainter, or more perfectly charming. It lies at the mouth of a dear little muddy creek, with a funny old mill for pumping the water off the sunken meadows; and all around for miles and miles is one great flat of sedge and seapink, alive with water-birds and intersected with dikes, where the herons fish all day long, poised on one leg in the middle of the stream as still as mice, exactly as if they were sitting to Marks for their portraits."
"Ah, delightful for a painter, I've no doubt," Hugh Massinger replied, half yawning to himself, "especially for a painter to whom mud and herons are bread and butter, and brackish water is Eiass and Allsopp; but scarcely, you'll admit, an attractive picture to the inartistic public, among whom I take the liberty, for this occasion only, humbly to rank myself. I go there, in fact, as a martyr to principle. I live for others. A member of my family- not to put too fine a point upon it, a lady abides for the present moment at Whitestrand, and believes herself to be seized or possessed by prescriptive right of a lien or claim to a certain fixed aliquot portion of my time and attention. I've never admitted the claim myself (being a legally minded soul); but just out of the natural sweetness )f my disposition, I go down occasionally (without prejudice) to whatever part of England she may chance to be inhabiting, for the sake of