Chapter XVIII

In point of fact, I met Strickland before I had been a fortnight in Paris.

I quickly found myself a tiny apartment on the fifth floor of a house in the Rue¹ des Dames², and for a couple of hundred francs bought at a second-hand³ dealer’s enough furniture to make it habitable. I arranged with the concierge⁴ to make my coffee in the morning and to keep the place clean. Then I went to see my friend Dirk Stroeve.

Dirk Stroeve was one of those persons whom, according to your character, you cannot think of without derisive⁵ laughter or an embarrassed shrug⁶ of the shoulders. Nature had made him a buffoon⁷. He was a painter, but a very bad one, whom I had met in Rome, and I still remembered his pictures. He had a genuine enthusiasm for the commonplace. His soul palpitating with love of art, he painted the models who hung about the stairway of Bernini in the Piazza⁸ de Spagna, undaunted by their obvious picturesqueness¹⁰; and his studio was full of canvases on which were portrayed¹¹ moustachioed, large-eyed peasants in peaked hats, urchins¹² in becoming rags, and women in bright petticoats. Sometimes they lounged at the steps of a church, and sometimes dallied¹³ among cypresses¹⁴ against a cloudless sky; sometimes they made love by a Renaissance¹⁵ well-head, and sometimes they wandered through the Campagna by the side of an ox-waggon. They were carefully drawn¹⁶ and carefully painted. A photograph could not have been more exact. One of the painters at the Villa¹⁷ Medici had called him Le Maître de la Boîte à Chocolats. To look at his pictures you would have thought that Monet, Manet, and the rest of the Impressionists had never been.

“I don’t pretend to be a great painter,” he said, “I’m not a Michael Angelo, no, but I have something. I sell. I bring romance into the homes of all sorts of people. Do you know, they buy my pictures not only in Holland, but in Norway and Sweden and Denmark? It’s mostly merchants who buy them, and rich tradesmen. You can’t imagine what the winters are like in those countries, so long and dark and cold. They like to think that Italy is like my pictures. That’s what they expect. That’s what I expected Italy to be before I came here.”

And I think that was the vision that had remained with him always, dazzling his eyes so that he could not see the truth; and notwithstanding the brutality¹⁸ of fact, he continued to see with the eyes of the spirit an Italy of romantic brigands¹⁹ and picturesque⁹ ruins. It was an ideal that he painted—a poor one, common and shop-soiled, but still it was an ideal; and it gave his character a peculiar²⁰ charm.

It was because I felt this that Dirk Stroeve was not to me, as to others, merely an object of ridicule²¹. His fellow-painters made no secret of their contempt for his work, but he earned a fair amount of money, and they did not hesitate to make free use of his purse. He was generous, and the needy²², laughing at him because he believed so naively²³ their stories of distress²⁴, borrowed from him with effrontery²⁵. He was very emotional, yet his feeling, so easily aroused, had in it something absurd, so that you accepted his kindness, but felt no gratitude²⁶. To take money from him was like robbing a child, and you despised him because he was so foolish. I imagine that a pickpocket²⁷, proud of his light fingers, must feel a sort of indignation with the careless woman who leaves in a cab a vanity-bag with all her jewels in it. Nature had made him a butt²⁸, but had denied him insensibility. He writhed²⁹ under the jokes, practical and otherwise, which were perpetually made at his expense, and yet never ceased, it seemed wilfully³⁰, to expose himself to them. He was constantly wounded, and yet his good-nature was such that he could not bear malice³¹: the viper³² might sting him, but he never learned by experience, and had no sooner recovered from his pain than he tenderly placed it once more in his bosom³³. His life was a tragedy written in the terms of knockabout farce³⁴. Because I did not laugh at him he was grateful to me, and he used to pour into my sympathetic ear the long list of his troubles. The saddest thing about them was that they were grotesque³⁵, and the more pathetic they were, the more you wanted to laugh.

But though so bad a painter, he had a very delicate feeling for art, and to go with him to picture-galleries was a rare treat. His enthusiasm was sincere and his criticism acute. He was catholic. He had not only a true appreciation³⁶ of the old masters, but sympathy with the moderns. He was quick to discover talent, and his praise was generous. I think I have never known a man whose judgment³⁷ was surer. And he was better educated than most painters. He was not, like most of them, ignorant of kindred arts, and his taste for music and literature gave depth and variety to his comprehension of painting. To a young man like myself his advice and guidance were of incomparable value.

When I left Rome I corresponded with him, and about once in two months received from him long letters in queer English, which brought before me vividly³⁸ his spluttering, enthusiastic³⁹, gesticulating conversation. Some time before I went to Paris he had married an Englishwoman, and was now settled in a studio in Montmartre. I had not seen him for four years, and had never met his wife.