Chapter 14 - Page 2

with
groping hands above the treetops. I wrote a criticism, and
arranged for reproductions with the editor of an art magazine, but
after it was written and accepted the proprietor, lifting what I
considered an obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus
Duran, Bastien-Lepage rookery, insisted upon its rejection.
Nettleship did not mind its rejection, saying, 'Who cares for such
things now? Not ten people,' but he did mind my refusal to show
him what I had written. Though what I had written was all eulogy,
I dreaded his judgment for it was my first art criticism. I hated
his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too much
concerned with the sense of touch, with the softness or roughness,
the minutely observed irregularity of surfaces, for his genius;
and I think he knew it. 'Rossetti used to call my pictures 'pot-
boilers,' he said, 'but they are all--all,' and he waved his arms
to the canvases, 'symbols.' When I wanted him to design gods and
angels and lost spirits once more, he always came back to the
point, 'Nobody would be pleased.' 'Everybody should have a
_raison d'etre_' was one of his phrases. 'Mrs--'s articles
are not good but they are her _raison d'etre_.' I had but
little knowledge of art, for there was little scholarship in the
Dublin Art School, so I overrated the quality of anything that
could be connected with my general beliefs about the world. If I
had been able to give angelical, or diabolical names to his lions
I might have liked them also and I think that Nettleship himself
would have liked them better, and liking them better have become a
better painter. We had the same kind of religious feeling, but I
could give a crude philosophical expression to mine while he could
only express his in action or with brush and pencil. He often told
me of certain ascetic ambitions, very much like my own, for he had
kept all the moral ambition of youth with a moral courage peculiar
to himself, as for instance--'Yeats, the other night I was
arrested by a policeman--was walking round Regent's Park
barefooted to keep the flesh under--good sort of thing to do--I
was carrying my boots in my hand and he thought I was a burglar;
and even when I explained and gave him half a crown, he would not
let me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met the
next policeman.'

He was very proud and shy, and I could not imagine anybody asking
him questions, and so I was content to take these stories as they
came, confirmations of stories I had heard in boyhood. One story
in particular had stirred my imagination, for, ashamed all my
boyhood of my lack of physical courage, I admired what was beyond
my imitation. He thought that any weakness, even a weakness of
body, had the