Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [34]
Burlap nodded slowly. He did not look directly at Mrs. Betterton, but kept his eyes averted and downcast as though he were addressing some little personage invisible to everyone but himself, standing to one side of her—his private daemon, perhaps; an emanation from himself, a little doppelganger. He was a man of middle height with a stoop and a rather slouching gait. His hair was dark, thick and curly, with a natural tonsure as big as a medal showing pink on the crown of his head. His grey eyes were very deeply set, his nose and chin pronounced but well shaped. his mouth full-lipped and rather wide. A mixture, according to old Bidlake, who was a caricaturist in words as well as with the pencil, of a movie villain and St. Anthony of Padua by a painter of the baroque, of a cardsharping Lothario and a rapturous devotee.
‘Yes, a great artist,’ he agreed, ‘but not one of the greatest.’ He spoke slowly, ruminatively, as though he were talking to himself. All his conversation was a dialogue with himself or that little doppelgdnger which stood invisibly to one side of the people he was supposed to be talking to; Burlap was unceasingly and exclusively selfconscious. ‘Not one of the greatest,’ he repeated slowly. As it happened, he had just been writing an article about the subject-matter of art for next week’s number of the Literary World. ‘Precisely because of that cynicism.’ Should he quote himself? he wondered.
‘How true that is!’ Mrs. Betterton’s applause exploded perhaps a little prematurely; her enthusiasm was always on the boil. She clasped her hands together. ‘How true!’ She looked at Burlap’s averted face and thought it so spiritual, so beautiful in its way.
‘How can a cynic be a great artist?’ Burlap went on, having decided that he’d spout his own article at her and take the risk of her recognizing it in print next Thursday. And even if she did recognize it, that wouldn’t efface the personal impression he’d made by spouting it. ‘Though why you want to make an impression,’ a mocking devil had put in, ‘unless it’s because she’s rich and useful, goodness knows!’ The devil was pitchforked back to where he came from. ‘One has responsibilities,’ an angel hastily explained. ‘The lamp mustn’t be hidden under a bushel. One must let it shine, especially on people of good will.’ Mrs. Betterton was on the side of the angels; her loyalty should be confirmed. ‘A great artist,’ he went on aloud, ‘is a man who synthesizes all experience. The cynic sets out by denying half the facts—the fact of the soul, the fact of ideals, the fact of God. And yet we’re aware of spiritual facts just as directly and indubitably as we’re aware of physical facts.’
‘Of course, of course!’ exclaimed Mrs. Bidlake
‘It’s absurd to deny either class of facts.’ ‘Absurd to deny me,’ said the demon, poking out his head into Burlap’s consciousness.
‘Absurd!’
‘The cynic confines himself to only half the world of possible experience. Less than half. For there are more spiritual than bodily experiences.’
‘Infinitely more!’
‘He may handle his limited subject-matter very well. Bidlake, I grant you, does. Extraordinarily well. He has all the sheer ability of the most consummate artists. Or had, at any rate.’
‘Had,’ Mrs. Betterton sighed. ‘When I first knew him.’ The implication was that it was her influence that had made him paint so well.
‘But he’s always applied his powers to something small. What he synthesizes in his art was limited, comparatively unimportant.’
‘That’s what I always told him,’ said Mrs. Betterton, reinterpreting those youthful arguments about Pre-Raphaelitism in a new and, for her own reputation, favourable light. ‘Consider Burne-Jones, I used to say.’ The memory of John Bidlake’s huge and Rabelaisian laughter reverberated