"'
'And you got from my father's book,--_The Veiled Queen_, all this'--I
was going to add--'jumble of classic story and mediaeval
mysticism,'--but I stopped short in time.
'All this and more--a thousand times more than could be rendered by
the art of any painter. For the age that Carlyle spits at and the
great and good John Ruskin scorns is gross, Mr. Aylwin; the age is
grovelling and gross. No wonder, then, that Art in our time has
nothing but technical excellence; that it despises conscience,
despises aspiration, despises soul, despises even ideas--that it is
worthless, all worthless.'
'Except as practised in a certain temple of art in a certain part of
London that shall be nameless, whence Calliope, Euterpe, and all the
rhythmic sisters are banished,' interposed Cyril.
'But how did you attain to this superlative excellence, Mr.
Wilderspin?' I asked.
'That would indeed be a long story to tell,' said he. 'Yet Philip
Aylwin's son has a right to know all that I can tell. My dear friend
here knows that, though famous now, I climbed the ladder of Art from
the bottom rung; nay, before I could even reach the bottom rung, what
a toilsome journey was mine to get within sight of the ladder at all!
The future biographer of the painter of "Faith and Love" will have to
record that he was born in a hovel; that he was nursed in a smithy;
that his cradle was a piece of board suspended from the smithy
ceiling by a chain, which his mother--his widowed mother--kept
swinging by an occasional touch in the intervals of her labours at
the forge.
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