“No, of course not.”
“Would I be fou if I picked the fruit off?”
“Vous vous moquez de moi!”
“Well then, would I be fou if I chopped the tree down, just as they have done here?”
“Oh, no, trees must be cut down.”
“Then I can plant a tree, tend it, pick it, and cut it down, but if I draw one I am fou. Is that right?”
The peasant broke into his broad grin again. “Yes, you must be fou to sit there like that. All the village says so.”
In the evenings he sat with the rest of the family in the living room. Around the immense wooden table the entire family gathered, sewing, reading, writing letters. His young brother Cor was a quiet child who rarely spoke. Of his sisters, Anna had married and moved away. Elizabeth disliked him so thoroughly that she did her best to pretend he had never come home. Willemien was sympathetic; she posed for Vincent whenever he asked her, and gave him an uncritical friendship. But their relationship was tied to earthly things.
Vincent worked at the table too, comfortable in the light of the huge yellow lamp which sat impartially in the centre. He copied his exercises or the sketches he had made in the fields that day. Theodorus watched him do one figure over a dozen times and always throw away the finished product with dissatisfaction; at last the dominie could contain himself no longer.
“Vincent,” he said, leaning across the broad expanse of table, “don’t you ever get them right?”
“No,” replied Vincent.
“Then I wonder if you aren’t making a mistake?”
“I’m making a great many, Father. Which one do you refer to?”
“It seems to me that if you had any talent, if you were really cut out to be an artist, those sketches would come right the first time.”
Vincent glanced down at his study of a peasant kneeling before a bag in which he was putting potatoes. He could not seem to catch the line of the beggar’s arm.
“Perhaps so, Father.”
“What I mean is, you shouldn’t have to draw those things a hundred times without ever getting them right. If you had any natural ability, they would come to you without all this trying.”
“Nature always begins by resisting the artist, Father,” he said, without putting down his pencil, “but if I really take my work seriously, I won’t allow myself to be led astray by that resistance. On the contrary, it will be a stimulus the more to fight for victory.”
“I don’t see that,” said Theodorus. “Good can never grow out of evil, nor can good work grow out of bad.”
“Perhaps not in theology. But it can in art. In fact, it must.”
“You’re wrong, my boy. An artist’s work is either good or bad. And if it’s bad, he’s no artist. He ought to have found that out for himself at the beginning and not have wasted all his time and effort.”
“But what if he has a happy life turning out bad art? What then?”
Theodorus searched his theological training, but he could find no answer to this question.
“No,” said Vincent, rubbing out the bag of potatoes and leaving the man’s left arm suspended stiffly in mid-air. “At bottom, nature and a true artist agree. It may take years of struggling and wrestling before she becomes docile and yielding, but in the end, the bad, very bad work will turn into good work and justify itself.”
“What if at the end the work remains poor? You’ve been drawing that fellow kneeling down for days and he’s still wrong. Suppose you go on drawing him for years and years and he keeps on being wrong?”
Vincent shrugged. “The artist takes that gamble, Father.”
“Are the rewards worth the gamble?”
“Rewards? What rewards?”
“The money one gets. And the position in society.”
Vincent looked up from his paper for the first time and examined his father’s face, feature by feature, as though he were looking at some strange being.
“I thought we were discussing good and bad art,” he said.
3
HE WORKED NIGHT and day at his craft. If he thought of the future at all, it was only to bring closer in fancy the time when he would no longer be a burden on Theo, and when the finished product of his work would approximate perfection. When he was too tired to sketch, he read. When he was too tired to do either, he went to sleep.
Theo sent Ingres paper, pictures from a veterinary school of the anatomy of a horse, a cow, and a sheep, some Holbeins in “The Models from the Artists,” drawing pencils, quill pens, the reproduction of a human skeleton, sepia, as many francs as he could spare, and the admonition to work hard and not become a mediocre artist. To this advice Vincent replied, “I shall do what I can, but mediocre in its simple signification I do not despise at all. And one certainly does not rise above that mark by despising what is mediocre. But what you say about hard work is entirely right. ‘Not a day without a line!’ as Gavarni warns us.”
More and more he had the feeling that the drawing of the figure was a good thing, and that indirectly it had a good influence on the drawing of landscape. If he drew a willow tree as if it were a living being—and it really was so after all—then the surroundings followed in due course, if only he concentrated all his attention on that same tree and did not give up until he had brought some life into it. He loved landscape very much, but ten times more he loved those studies from life, sometimes of startling realism, which had been drawn so well by Gavarni, Daumier, Doré, De Groux and Felicien Rops. By working on types of labourers, he hoped eventually to be able to do illustrations for the magazines and newspapers; he wanted to support himself completely during the long hard years in which he would perfect his technique and go on to higher forms of expression.
One time his father, who thought he read for entertainment, said, “Vincent, you are always talking about how hard you must work. Then why do you waste your time on all those silly French books?”
Vincent placed a marking finger in “Le Père Goriot” and looked up. He kept hoping that some day his father might understand him when he spoke of serious things.
“You see,” he said slowly, “not only does the drawing of figures and scenes from life demand a knowledge of the handicraft of drawing, but it demands also profound studies of literature.”
“I must say I don’t gather that. If I want to preach a good sermon, I don’t spend my time in the kitchen watching your mother pickle tongues.”
“Speaking of tongues,” said Anna Cornelia, “those fresh ones ought to be ready by tomorrow breakfast.”
Vincent did not bother to upset the analogy.
“I can’t draw a figure,” he said, “without knowing all about the bones and muscles and tendons that are inside it. And I can’t draw a head without knowing what goes on in that person’s brain and soul. In order to paint life one must understand not only anatomy, but what people feel and think about the world they live in. The painter who knows his own craft and nothing else will turn out to be a very superficial artist.”
“Ah, Vincent,” said his father, sighing deeply, “I’m afraid you’re going to develop into a theorist!”
Vincent returned to “Le Père Goriot.”
Another time he became greatly excited at the arrival of some books by Cassagne which Theo sent to correct the trouble with his perspective. Vincent ran through them lovingly and showed them to Willemien.
“I know of no better remedy for my ailment,” he said to her. “If I am cured of it, I shall have these books to thank.”
Willemien smiled at him with her mother’s clear eyes.